Japan's NTT to begin remote work as norm for 30k employees
english.kyodonews.netNtt has 320k employees. I wonder what the other 290 will think?
In Southern Europe NTT is mostly a bodyshop. Their target demographic is junior engineers willing to do unpaid overtime for abysmal pay. Pretty sure remote work doesn't make a big difference.
That’s the reality for big Japanese tech companies.
They pay you in reputation, and reputation doesn’t transfer to other big corps since they see frequent job changes (sometimes capped at twice in a lifetime) as a red flag and won’t hire people.
If the reputation has no utility for the employee, why would the employee accept payment in the form of reputation? Is the employee oblivious to the lack of utility of reputation?
There's a couple of things not mentioned here.
Due to the more or less deflationary economy, Japanese wages have not increased for the better part of three decades. (Deflating prices mean that even with stagnant wages, you're still able to buy more.) Job hopping is unlikely to actually result in increased wages. (Inflation is now coming to Japan due to the general global inflation from the war in Ukraine, so that will be an interesting scenario to watch.)
Japan is a heavily reputation based society. In the way that US uses credit score to determine a lot of things, Japan uses this sort of reputation as a proxy to determine eligibility for many things. As a general example, finding in apartment in Japan requires a guarantor (essentially a cosigner who agrees to act as a fallback option in case you can't pay) and landlords want a Japanese national person or entity to do it most of the time. https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-a-rental-guarantor/
You need a guarantor in france too so I wouldn't say it's unique to japan.
This essay is a perennial HN favorite. And it does seem uniquely Japanese:
> When I started my own company, I was living in an apartment that I had first rented as an employee of a megacorp. The entirety of the credit investigation was me presenting my business card to them. Possessing it implies both sterling moral character, stable finances, and a responsible party to intercede with should there ever be an issue with me as a tenant. (Japanese landlords and lenders will, as a matter of policy, escalate any disagreement with you to your boss, as the social opprobrium you’ll suffer will get you to quickly cave.)
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...
Speaking from experience renting in Tokyo both before that article was written and more recently, as well as in Paris, while they're indeed very different things have also been changing a lot in Japan, partly due to new regulation.
Back ~10y ago, the norm was very much that you needed a personal guarantor, and sometimes you could or had to additionally use an assigned guarantor company which may or may not have additional requirements.
These days, the norm is more that you need to provide a local 緊急連絡先 (emergency contact), and sign up with a guarantor company that acts as insurer and usually have a blanket check. One similarity with France is the general requirement of having a verifiable income of minimum 3x of the rent.
Many other points that the author brings up look very different today compared to in 2014.
Social reputation is still big in Japan.
Reputation is also highly correlated with company stability in Japan.
Such reputation buys you things like A) easier time attracting a future spouse B) respect in certain social circles and transactions, transferrable to your partner and children (yes this is a thing) C) a network of individuals also “smart and hardworking” like you
F**k that, I'll take cash!
I mean of course. It is always preferable option if available.
Reputation provides utility in other ways. For example, social status and respect from others.
Kind of makes me wonder why there hasn't been a brain drain from Japan like there has been from elsewhere in Asia and Europe to the various tech hubs. Is the culture just too difficult to leave behind? Yes, it is a G7 country with first world living standards but expatriates from other first world countries are not rare in the tech hubs.
Pretty closed culture, relatively bad at speaking English, and they are still very rich - closest "better" country to live is US.
Except for language, Canada is similar. The US manages a positive brain drain just on more money and opportunities. Canada is great, in a couple of years I might be looking for a job there.
Can confirm, having the dubious joy of working with them.
If you’re doing a lot of extra hours, not having to commute and getting some peace makes a huge difference in making it sustainable.
But if you work for them in Barcelona the salary is still pretty bad.
How bad is pretty bad?
I don't know about NTT, but salaries for software devs are really low in general. Think €30-40k per year. How FAANG are not leveraging such a poorly paid workforce in countries with a great climate, developed, safe, etc, I will never know.
That's low.
In Romania FAANGs aren't paying better salaries than market average, so the only incentive to work for a FAANG is to have it on your CV, stay 2 years and find better employment.
FAANGs get it really cheap here as they pay 10x lower wages than in the US.
Romania doesn't have Netflix, Apple, Facebook and barely has Google through Fitbit.
I think the sort of person FAANG wants to hire, knows how much they can get from moving and has either already relocated or found remote work.
Do FAANG hire remote developers?
Because any good talent leaves Japan immediately for the USA as soon as they can for better pay and a more relaxed life?
Parent was talking about Spain, not Japan.
And as a foreigner I think it's very hard to get a working visa in the US.
They do. At least some of the FAANG have important software development offices in Japan.
The parent was speaking about Spain, not Japan.
Yeah, FAANG can just hire all the engineers at NTT, all these Indian IT outsourcing companies, European tech companies and other I might have missed. I mean for christ sake this is 2022. If every CRUD micro services peddler and every network engineer who solves 5 firewall opening issues in a day couldn't get USD 200K / year for 6 hr work day, free food and drinks, onsite laundry, massage, haircut and medical checkup. What is the point of even living on this polluted earth.
Why do you think software developers in the rest of the world are worse than their US peers?
In US too, it is close to a bodyshop. In fact I had friends there who would get full or partial work from home in 2014 or so. Not sure about pay as I didn't check. I was more enamored by WFH as I had to commute 2-3 hrs/day daily for work in those days.
“ The telecom company has said it is considering allowing all 320,000 employees of the NTT group worldwide to work remotely.”
Full remote.
I work for a subsidiary of NTT and we've been remote first for years, with travel expenses handled as outlined in the article. It's pretty great.
Of course, US telecoms would never consider this despite NTT being one of the stodgiest on the planet.
Another reason why big corp encourages telework (while there are some ventures don't encourage) is because their office in Tokyo is very expensive. Anyway it's good thing.
Good. As an oil importing country, their fuel consumption will keep going lower
I really doubt many people in Japan commute by car.
> I really doubt many people in Japan commute by car.
Having lived in Japan and commuted by car in Japan, I can say that this is definitely not true.
In the inner parts of the larger cities, yes, very true. But in the periphery of larger cities and in every provincial city (which are most of them), there is a lot of car commuting.
For reference, I would say larger cities are Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama. Nagoya is probably around the threshold (not so sure, didn’t spend much time there).
Provincial cities like Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Sendai, and Sapporo are very much car-centric, although the public transportation system is quite robust. Most of the public transport in these cities is to and from the inner city and for short jaunts between neighborhoods by folks who don’t drive. For jobs outside of the center city, driving a car would be quite common.
The outskirts of Tokyo, etc. are similar to these provincial cities.
Smaller cities like Nagasaki or Shizuoka are even more car-centric.
Japan has one of the highest rates of car ownership in the world. It’s pretty common outside of Tokyo/Osaka/Nagoya.
Have you been to Japan? It often seems like people who have never been only have this ideal in their minds that everyone in Japan travels by bullet train or local commuter trains.
There are many bus routes, and many people who still own and drive their own cars even in larger cities like Tokyo or Osaka.
My old roommate in Gifu commutes to her school job by car. Car use is very common in many of the not so big cities.
It might have a minor impact on trains, which could be powered by oil based power plants. Reality is a lot f global electricity is still oil powered.
They’re one of the biggest importers of natural gas. Something has to run the Shinkansen.
Shinkansens run on electricity. Oil is mostly in the manufacturing and plastics industry, unlike other countries where domestic consumption is a significant share. (Tokyo power sector is mostly thermal and nuclear.)
They hardly produce any nuclear anymore. Natural gas is the largest source by far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan
EDIT: these numbers appear to be old, since 2019 they’ve tuned reactors back on and stopped relying on LNG as much. I can’t find good numbers on recent data but in 2019 they imported more gas than any other country.
Fossil-fueled thermal power generation accounted for 71.7% of total electricity generated during the year [2021], down from 74.9% the previous year [2020]. Coal and LNG accounted for 26.5% and 31.7%, respectively, and both fossil fuels are on a declining trend. Nuclear power accounted for 5.9%, up from 4.3% the previous year.
Source: https://www.isep.or.jp/en/1243/
Reference #4
I wonder why geothermal isn't big there. I'd naively assume that they could get a significant portion to their electricity from geothermal. Does anyone know what's preventing Japan from doing that?
Without knowing how good a geothermal resource they have, I imagine it is similar to what prevents it from being popular where I live where there is a fantastic geothermal resource: Economics, know how, FUD
Shinkansen is electric. Japan total energy mix is about 20% LNG or so.
Huh, it is higher now. Not quite 40% though, coal and LNG accounted for 26.5% and 31.7% in 2021: https://www.isep.or.jp/en/1243/
Renewables are aggressively scaling up and nuclear looks like it's rebounding some.
Ah yeah you’re right. A lot has changed since 2019.
Unnecessary commuting should always be included in working hours and expensed.
Are you going to expense your lunch breakfast dinner and rent as well? You need all those as well in order to work. If you work from home are you going to expense your electricity? Where is the line?
Yes. My employer (US fintech) gives me a daily meal stipend while working remotely, as well as covers my mobile phone, internet, and a portion to cover my home office. This excludes the annual equipment, desk, and chair stipend I receive.
This was all outlined in our remote handbook provided with my offer letter.
It used to be that meals were tax deductible (which is why Google offered meals) but that got restricted. If a company offers a meal stipend how does that work? Is it just bonus compensation but ear marked for food only?
Depends on the company and how they're paying it out. I've seen food services where a daily credit is issued to your service account (funded by the org), I've seen it as bonus comp, etc. Whichever mechanism is used is usually some sort of crude optimization attempt for what's best for the org and the employee with whatever services and regulatory framework they're working with (wrt to taxes).
Are you in Europe?
I am a US citizen residing in the US with the intent to expatriate to Europe on a remote worker visa, which my employer will support.
Congratulations! Honestly.
I share so others will advocate for this at scale. It’s not some sort of impossible or unreasonable request.
> If you work from home are you going to expense your electricity?
Funnily enough, yes.
A very large group of countries have introduced 'teleworking' legislation post-covid, where employers are legally obliged to pay allowances to employees per day of remote work (specifically to offset electricity and internet expenses).
Japanese companies often include both a commuting allowance and a housing allowance as distinct components of your pay; neither is counted as income for the purposes of taxation. Meals at company cafeterias are typically not free (though some places are), but typically very reasonable -- e.g. 300 JPY for curry-rice etc.
Nit: That's true for taxation, but counted for social insurance/pension fee. Latter is big for lower income workers.
The talk should be opened either way. Companies are far too eager to put high RE prices / high commuting costs / long commutes onto people, but no one is asking "where is the line?" when the roles are reversed.
God forbid we play a few things by ear and see what happens.
You have discovered another road to feudalism.
When people cast wishes I’d like them to imagine they are holding a monkey’s paw whilst doing so.
You shouldn’t be able to expense things you would need if you weren’t working as well.
A fair line would be that you're compensated for things you do that you otherwise wouldn't do. You'd still eat, but many companies do compensate their employees for their meals during working hours.
Actually in Spain you must get a plus by law to cover electricity expenses when working from home.
No, just unnecessary commuting.
Yeah. Businesses owe citizens. People owe nothing to businesses.
What about the extra space for a home office?
You love to see it.
I’m sure that’ll help the already high levels of chronic loneliness in Japan…
That's seems a quite naive/brash take.
Isn't it the case that Japanese work culture, "stay until the boss leaves", is what contributed substantially to loneliness in Japan? A lack of work-life balance? It seems to me that remote work could lessen this effect greatly.
Also, you seem to be assuming it will just lead to people working from home alone. Japanese housing is notoriously small, and cafes ever-popular, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to speculate that this could lead to a boom in working from cafes and co-working spaces. Unlike a majority of the rest of the world, too, Japan has far less urban sprawl - so going to such places is less of a hassle.
Seems to me this would do the opposite of what you suggest.
Maybe you mean suburban sprawl? Or maybe you just mean the urban area is less disjointed? Urban sprawl is exactly how I would characterize Japan, but maybe I just have the terminology wrong. It's actually one of the reasons I suspect such dense cities work so well, as the mixed zoning creates self serving blocks of commerce and residential. Like you've pointed out, it could actually make remote work a very vibrant lifestyle, full of coffee shops, cafes, regular faces and casual conversation.
If I had to work remotely for the rest of my life, I'd choose Japan, so that I could walk out my front door and around the corner to pretty much anything I'll ever need. I can't do that in the suburbs, pretty much anything useful is a car journey away. I worked remotely from the suburbs for about 4 years, and it was incredibly isolating. There was no-where to go that fit into even an hour long break.
> Maybe you mean suburban sprawl? Or maybe you just mean the urban area is less disjointed? Urban sprawl is exactly how I would characterize Japan, but maybe I just have the terminology wrong.
No, he's right. Sprawl is inherently a negative term. Japan has large cities because you know, they can't put people in Manchuria (they've tried) or on the Moon, so they have to put them somewhere. So the most efficient way to house large numbers of people is in dense cities.
The US is a great example of both urban sprawl (outside downtown, American cities have town to village population densities) and suburban sprawl. The worst of both worlds, really.
Interesting, I think it's fair to suggest that sprawl has some negative connotations but I don't think it's quite so severe. I would definitely call some of the streets of Kyoto sprawling, as in, they have wandered in strange directions like a creeping vine. I also wouldn't suggest that Japanese cities have expanded carefully, they have taken as much space as they feasibly can in their expansion, and replaced it all with concrete. Perhaps the cities themselves were carefully considered from an urban planning point of view.
But I think in actuality, taking zoning and planning control away from the people who use the zones is what causes most of America's strange layout. People absolutely want medium to high density mixed use communities, and affordable housing, but you're not allowed to build that in America.
> Isn't it the case that Japanese work culture, "stay until the boss leaves", is what contributed substantially to loneliness in Japan? A lack of work-life balance?
I keep hearing this thrown around, and I have no reason not to believe it, as on paper it makes sense.
But have there actually been studies around this?
I’ve never been there, but everything I hear about Japanese office culture sounds terrible: long hours, stodgy environment, forced participation in dangerous binge drinking.
That said, pretty much everything else about Japanese culture seems awesome.
> forced participation in dangerous binge drinking
In the UK we just voluntarily participate in dangerous binge drinking
That might tempt me move to UK. :)
Clearly office work doesn’t help with this. Perhaps the flexibility and the removal of the need for things like capsule hotels will help. Maybe towns outside of the large megacities will see a renaissance ad people under 65 will be living there.
As someone who did just that (went remote, moved to a small town with a Bay Area salary). I can say it’s amazing and highly recommend.
That said, no one else I know chose it. You lose a lot of the city night life and niche things. Instead you gain space, more rural style hobbies, less diverse food (particularly if you eat out), etc.
A lot of people aren’t able to recognize the pros / cons of such a trade.
For anyone reading, I recommend living in a suburban / rural location. Get out and take care of a big garden, go to local events and join a few clubs. Definitely a positive experience.
How long ago did you make that switch? Asking because with things like that, there is always an amazing honeymoon period, but reality settles in a few years down the road.
Not just talking about the urban=>rural switch specifically, but in the opposite direction as well, and when it comes to pretty much any major change of a similar nature in general.
I live about an hour outside a major Northeast city in an ex-urban/semi-rural location. (It's not really rural but I'm one of three houses on about 100+ acres of land and can't really see my neighbors at this time of year.)
I find it's a decent compromise. I have space. I can take walks in the woods or easily drive to small mountain hikes. But I'm only about an hour to go in for live theater, a meal, etc. And there's nothing keeping me from going into town for a weekend if I wanted to.
> less diverse food (particularly if you eat out)
After spending a few years in a very rural part of CA while rebuilding my cabin, the lack of quality diverse organic produce I'd taken for granted in SF Bay area grocers is one of the biggest complaints I have.
I haven't seen a Pomelo in a store for over 4 years now, let alone an organic one.
You can buy exotic produce online these days, so you can mitigate that if you know what you want.
How about thinking that this will give them an opportunity for some mental relaxation as well? I live in Tokyo. The commutes are hour long one-way on average. Maybe it will give them more time & mental energy to explore other things.
Yes, having more free time will definitely help people have a social life