I lived and worked in Japan for a few years and can vouch for everything the author said.
I worked in the game industry in Japan and the salaries were terrible. Salaries were half or less compared to California, while the cost of living in Tokyo was similar (at least back then, it could easily be more expensive in the Bay Area now). I ended up leaving my job to do consulting from home for clients both in Japan and abroad and more than doubled my income.
Living abroad was a a great experience though. The process of studying a new language and using it in day to day life successfully was incredibly satisfying. I'd love to do that again in another country.
As a Japanese programmer who's terribly paid according to the many American fellow programmers, I have to defend this practice. Why an engineer has to be paid, say, like three times than janitors? Because of the markets. Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones; they're equally contributing to the society. But what if the market is set up in a way that both salaries are roughly equalized? This is somewhat how the Japanese salary system works, and I believe this is The Better Way. I believe people are better off in a more egalitarian society. I'm not claiming that Japan is anywhere close to that overall, but as long as the salary goes I think this is a saner system. (I also worked in a US corp, and hated their salary gap.)
If, as a programmer, you are not contributing much more value to the world than a janitor, you are doing something terribly terribly wrong. (And I say this as someone who has worked two janitorial jobs.)
As a former janitor myself, I strongly second this. I used to mop floors and clean toilets. I helped a few people a little bit, and they treated me okay. I then learned to program and was surprised at how much more interested business people were in having my help. If money talks, the money coming out of their own pockets was telling me just how much more sincerely they valued my programming than my toilet cleaning services.
And recently I've been teaching my middle school son to program. A few weeks ago, a project he did for his aunt caught the attention of a Gifted and Talented Ed (GATE program) director in another Silicon Valley city, who started recommending it to all the parents. My son had been accustomed to the school routine of having to use his skills to do hard work on school projects that were then treated as having no real value by the people who requested them. Over a weekend, his programming skills suddenly made him valuable in the real world to a lot of adults, none of whom he'd ever met. It was a revelation to him. It's unlikely that his yard-cleaning skills would have produced similar results.
It appears to me that the feedback from the real world is that people would much rather have my family writing code for them than washing their windows, and our experience is hardly unique. I can't say for sure that Japan's enlightened policy of paying programmers like janitors has contributed to Japan's near irrelevance in the global software industry, but when I've worked with developers in Japan (I lived in Tokyo and speak Japanese), I've always been glad that I wasn't a Japanese programmer.
You guys disagree with the Japanese programmer because of the difference in cultural contexts. You see how "valuable" programming is compared to janitorial in the context of our culture. Western society (business people, aunts, and teachers) assign monetary (and other) value to programming skills.
The Japanese programmer was talking about how noble the jobs are. You may think the programmer is underpaid. The Japanese programmer thinks the janitor is undervalued (not viewed highly enough for the noble work that he is doing). He has his own cultural context, with its own emphases. Their free market reflects their culture- programmers and janitors are "valued" more equally than in the West.
He's also saying that a more egalitarian valuation is better than ours which has greater variance.
Western "society" isn't assigning "cultural" value when some American guy offers me his own money to build something he wants for himself. He's estimating how much money he can net from the deal after paying my fee, not judging my value as a human being. The same for those who hired me to mop their floors. The people paying me clearly estimated different dollar-denominated benefits to themselves for the different types of work done by the same person.
Yes, the Japanese programmer was talking about how "noble" the jobs are, but Western marxists do the same thing. If his objection was to people's attitudes about the inherent human worth of a janitor, well, I couldn't agree more, thank you very much. I was just as noble a person when I was a janitor, but what people were willing to offer me financially for my work made it clear that one type of work was more financially valuable to them than the other. Paying me for nobility hides a price signal that I can use to adapt my work so that it is of more value to others.
Pay for theoretical nobility ought to mean equal pay for everyone, which is the kind of economic inflexibility that is ultimately self-limiting.
I totally agree that the best programmer can make more of a difference in every way to the world than the best janitor.
HOWEVER- For hundreds (thousands?) of years, money and behaving in a way that is profit driven was reserved for the lowest of what was considered people in Japanese society. "Merchants" (a broader term than our interpretation of it) were seen as barely a step up from the lowest group that we would consider people, the eta "filthy mass" or hinen "non humans".
So that might explain some of why their culture still might not value money like we do.
What is money other than assigning a cultural value? Money isn't separate from the culture and the idea that the amounts assigned should be dictated mainly by that part of the culture called the market is also a cultural value.
Well, without programmers we might live in like the seventies, were computers were insignificant in everyday life and even in most businesses. Still, not that bad. They had nice funk music, way more attitude, and could relax better. (And let's not even go into the sixties, who tons of people remember as a golden era).
Now, without janitors we'd be like in the middle ages. We'd have to clean everything ourselves, everywhere. The roads would be like 19th century Paris or 16th century London. The stench would be unbelievable, plus lots of diceases.
Great comment. And really, neither one is right; they're just different.
Also, even from my western perspective, I can see logic in both positions. Programming certainly requires more skill than janitorial work. On the other hand, it's more inherently rewarding as well (at least to most people). So even outside of cultural biases, if there's sufficient highly skilled labour available, it makes sense for pay rates to equalize (and eventually for less desirable jobs to be paid even more than skilled ones).
Janitors keep places clean so programmers can focus on programming and thus "contribute to society." Assuming programmers are doing some good, not cleaning their own office lets them do more of it.
In this way I think janitors can contribute significantly. But I think the more important point is that contribution to society is always a team effort, not an individual thing. Any contribution you make is in part thanks to your parents, teachers, co-workers, janitors, and so on. They deserve some credit.
Not bollocks. Think about the value of a slightly less dirty floor for an hour. Now think about the value of a slightly less buggy website. Which one actually matters?
> Without the janitor the building doesn't last.
Janitors aren't carpenters or construction workers or architects or civil engineers. They're janitors.
Think about a skyscraper in Manhattan. Think about the many businesses employing a multitude of people within. Now think about how long they would be able to keep running if all the janitors left and if you couldn't get any more. You would have folk selling crack in the stairwells within the week and businesses folding within the month.
Also, as to your comparison, it strongly depends which business you are in. If you are running a building services company and your web designers quit, that might lose you some business. If your janitors quit, you are out of business. (edited to add - even if you are in a web design business, if you need a building to run the business from then the janitor will be a fundamental part of keeping the business afloat, unless you can get your web designers to also mop the floors and manage the security and maintenance. I have worked for a small media company in London where this was almost exactly the case, only there the CEO didn't expect it of the staff, but took over all janitorial duties himself as it was a small building and didn't take much time out of his day. He'd do most of his planning while cleaning.)
There is a truth behind the cliché of the chief monk being the guy with the brush sweeping up and there is good reason behind the cleaning days that are promoted by Hidesaburo Kagiyama as a management practice for Japanese companies, where the day starts with the CEO cleaning a toilet with their bare hands in front of their employees.
Here's an example of Hidesaburo Kagiyama visiting a Chinese University to explain and demonstrate his philosophy:
"When Kagiyama visited a university in China to clean the toilets with the students, the toilets were exactly as described above. The students held their breath and waited to see how Kagiyama would treat those filthy toilets. Under the gaze of the students, Kagiyama started pushing the pile of feces and urine deep into the toilet bowl with his bare hand and flushed it. He then looked back at the students quietly and said, “Now you clean this toilet.” In this way, he assigned the toilets to the students respectively. Looking at the example set by Kagiyama, the students could no longer back out. They set about to clean the toilets."
Hidesaburo Kagiyama is the president of Yellow Hat, a Japanese car parts supplier that takes just over a billion dollars (120 billion Yen) in yearly revenue.
> Think about a skyscraper in Manhattan. Think about the many businesses employing a multitude of people within. Now think about how long they would be able to keep running if all the janitors left and if you couldn't get any more. You would have folk selling crack in the stairwells within the week and businesses folding within the month.
Are you kidding me? If a bunch of janitors left, you'd replace them with another bunch. It's a low-skilled job which makes little difference at the margin.
You are confusing price with value. Water is much more common than the essential amino acids and costs much less and is far easier to replace, but food and water are both required to keep living.
There's some truth in that. I lived in Japan for many years and the egalitarianism in the society made for a pretty smooth running country that still impresses me. At the root of arguments that tech workers deserve a higher salary there seems to be an underlying assumption that people deserve more if they're more intelligent or talented. I lean more towards the idea that "to whom much has been given, much shall be required". There's an organization called the WageMark Foundation[1] that ranks companies on wage disparity, setting 8:1 as their target (on average its closer to 200:1)[2]. They say large wage gaps undermine good business practices and have proven “detrimental to economic growth and the existence of a healthy middle-income population.” When I found a local company that has a max wage gap of 10:1 and an inclusive profit sharing structure[3], they earned my respect and customer loyalty.
At the root of arguments that tech workers deserve a higher salary there seems to be an underlying assumption that people deserve more if they're more intelligent or talented.
Do you really think people are arguing from that perspective?
Maybe "to whom much has been given, much shall be required" works as a moral principle, but when talking about business transactions and programmers increasing company income, 'much shall be required from the more talented' meaning 'required by your boss, who will pocket the income from your work instead of you having it' that seems more 'exploitative' than 'enlightened'.
Maybe if the entire company had everyone at the same pay, and any excess income was taxed for the use of the whole society, I could see it.
> Maybe if the entire company had everyone at the same pay, and any excess income was taxed for the use of the whole society, I could see it.
I think that's why this works in Japan. The American notion of these CEOs earning millions (and then getting extra millions in bonuses even when they screw up or are fired) is very foreign (as the article says, the company will keep you in style appropriate to your station, but in more subtle ways). The conglomerate pays everyone similarly, makes modest profits (which probably means that some parts of it are losing money big time, and subsidized by the profitable divisions - but it would be unthinkable to just close a division and fire everyone) and returns them to shareholders, who are at least perceived as being mostly ordinary folks saving for retirement.
Well, I think some people are arguing that the market is a fair arbiter of wealth distribution. A lot of places have a more nuanced view. Janitors prevent the spread of disease and save lives. How many programmers can say that, I wonder.
At the root of arguments that tech workers deserve a higher salary there seems to be an underlying assumption that people deserve more if they're more intelligent or talented.
I don't believe this to the be the root at all. People are mostly arguing that it's all about market value.
I've seen people who were more talented than me in lower income jobs, and I'm sure the other scenario exists as well. However, I'm employed based on a specific talent which is also associated with a specific median market value.
A janitor does not need much training for his work. So he can start working full time much earlier than an engineer, who most likely went to school for an extra 6 to 8 years to train for the job.
It would be totally unfair for an engineer to miss 8 years of salary, amass a huge student loan, and still be paid equal to a janitor.
Well, then I suppose you would be in favor of a system where engineers are paid more for the first 8 (or, say, 10) years, and then both jobs are adjusted down to the same salary? Perhaps with jobs also paying off loans.
Even as a former janitor, it's obvious to me, as it would be to most janitors, that if I were an employer and could get either janitors or programmers for the same price, I'd hire as many programmers as I could, as few janitors as I could get away with, increasing the value of the products and services I could sell while lowering my costs: profit! Of course, every other sane employer would do the same thing, making these theoretically cheap programmers hard to find (without payments under the table to both programmers and the inevitable government enforcers) and leaving a lot of theoretically well-paid janitors unemployed. In other words, the normal real-world consequences of enforced utopian economic theory.
I'm not totally sure how that's different than what happens now. Is any company swelling their employee ranks with janitors?
The reason programmers command a higher salary than janitors in the US is due to labor demand; programmers can leverage that to their advantage. If I understand the article correctly, there's no need to do so in Japan because what programmers would leverage demand for (better social status/quality of life) is simply given to them.
It's also worth saying that salary aside, programmer is a better job than janitor for most people because it's more stimulating and rewarding. So it's not like you'll have a bunch of potential programmers deciding they can make almost as much money as a janitor and thus forego education, etc. In fact, isolated, it's likely to keep out people who are only into programming for the money, although in Japan the increased social status/quality of life replaces the salary incentive so it probably doesn't work there.
I also disagree with your implication that this system is economically infeasible. It's been working for decades (millennia?), and has built Japan into a world economic power. I'm not saying it's been without negatives, but I would argue that no labor system is.
I don't see the flaw in that scenario. People want to hire lots of programmers now in the united states - good programmers are in short supply ("programmers" are not, for some value of "programmer").
I guess the unstated implication of your scenario is that businesses would start paying programmers more to work for them. However, at least in Japan, this has not happened. Programmer salaries stay close to other employees.
I don't think I can snap my fingers and change things everywhere, but I think there's ample evidence that similar salaries for disparate educational requirements works on a societal level. Thus is not really a, "what if," scenario.
Big Japanese companies are like small communist governments. Once you are in, you get paid the same as everyone else, regardless of your value, because it's not as though you could leave. If you left, nobody would hire you, so your "market value" would be next to zero. So why pay you more? You get paid the same as everyone else in your hiring cohort, and you do whatever work they tell you to do, and that will always be true for the rest of your life. You marry someone from the company, and if the company tells you to leave her and go live overseas for a few years, you do it. Your loyalty is to the State---I mean the Company---first.
In exchange, you get a lifetime security net that gives you the same guaranteed life as your coworkers. Serve the hive, and you need never fear. If you ever left it, you would never again have access to a security net from anybody, and with so much of your life depending on your hive membership, you're unlikely ever to leave or to be thrown out.
In such a system, where you don't know how you could survive outside the hive, maintaining the hive matters more to the bees than increasing profits. Yes, maybe the hive could get some economic benefit from hiring more women due to their being undervalued in the market, but maybe the unintended consequences of changing something like that might destabilize the hive. It's just not worth the risk if your whole life is going to depend on this one hive.
And maybe your hive could benefit by hiring skilled people in mid-career. But none of the hives do that. They've never done it and don't even know how. What would you pay somebody joining the hive in mid-career? How could you even judge the value of someone financially? We've never done that; nobody does that; there's no "market". What impact might it have on existing bees, who have been together since age 22, to have a foreign bee join them in mid-life? It's just not worth the risk to the long-term stability of the safety net on which all life depends. Don't change anything. Do what has always worked, defend the hive, and it will defend you.
I'm not sure if this is your idea of something "working on a societal level" but it's not mine. Ironically, I think this "stability over adaptation" approach puts Japan at greater risk of instability over the long run.
This is why it is a good idea for the state to provide grants and fees for tertiary education within a broadly egalitarian society. If engineers trained well in things they enjoy are getting jealous of janitors if their pay scales get too close, things are pretty screwed one way or another.
Employees are not compensated because of the value they bring to society, but the value they bring to a company.
Janitors and programmers may be parts of the same machine, but the programmers are expensive cogs which have to be lubricated with money to keep them working (some cogs, obviously, are smaller and need less oil.)
Janitors, on the other hand, and other employees who contribute little to the bottom line of a company, are treated like caster wheels. Annoying when they're not working properly, but trivial to replace, and mostly not worth caring about.
Eh employees are compensated based on the market rates - which employers collude to depress - rather than value they generate. Company profit is revenue minus cost after all.
Your compensation isn't determined by nobility or a sense of equity.
It's determined by the difficulty of the job.
The more difficult the job, the less people are able to do it, the smaller the supply of labor for that position, the higher the paycheck. It's that simple.
When a market doesn't reflect that, it is horribly broken and will be horribly abused by the participants.
> Your compensation isn't determined by nobility or a sense of equity.
> It's determined by the difficulty of the job.
I strongly disagree. Example: working in a sweatshop is infinitely more difficult than being a software engineer and pays infinitely less.
Your compensation is determined by a big set of factors that I'm sure a sociologist could spell out for us all. I argue that the difficulty of the job is in fact not nearly as important as other factors like race/ethnicity, gender, mental health, etc.
> When a market doesn't reflect that, it is horribly broken and will be horribly abused by the participants.
I think with "difficult" he didn't mean how physically taxing it is, but how hard it is to find people who can do it. Almost anybody can to the work in a sweat shop after a couple of days (weeks?) of training. Becoming a programmer is not something everybody can do and even for those who can it takes years of study before they are competitive on the job market.
You're missing a dimension here: Your salary is determined in large part by your ability to negotiate.
Jobs are not open market. There's no information clarity about what your competitors for a job are likely to demand. Consequently, you can't depend on the magical hand alone to determine your salary.
Are you talking about in America? It's true that salaries aren't totally transparent, but you really have to stick your head in the ground to not have any idea what a given job pays: http://www.glassdoor.com/
> It's determined by the difficulty of the job.
The more difficult the job, the less people are able to do it, the smaller the supply of labor for that position, the higher the paycheck. It's that simple.
I wish the world worked that way. In reality, difficult programming jobs (say game engine programmer) or research positions pay less than code monkey jobs at big corps.
>Because of the markets. Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones;
So...a noble job should be better compensated? Why? Doesn't that become an issue with the concept of nobility?
> they're equally contributing to the society
How do you reason? I'd like to know how you came to that conclusion that they must be equal.
Perhaps the issue is that compensation: money, prestige, and quality of life is better for an engineer in the U.S. than Japan. At least, that seems to be the viewpoint of the American Programmers you know: More Money > Better Quality of Life.
I agree that a more egalitarian society would be better.
> the viewpoint of the American Programmers you know: More Money > Better Quality of Life.
The article addresses this directly, with an unattributed quote that he then expands upon:
> “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.”
>Japan has a saying “ichioku-sohchu-ryu” which translates to “a nation of middle-class people.” However, in the past few decades, they’ve seen the middle-class shrinking at twice the average rate of other OECD countries. Since 1980, incomes have dropped for the lower classes while they’ve risen for those in the higher classes. And this problem is exacerbated by the lack of employment security. During Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s term (2001-2006), the number of people working regular jobs dropped by 1.9 million while numbers of those in temporary positions rose by 3.3 million. Since the middle-class started disappearing, there’s been a reported increase in depression, domestic violence and suicide – which indicates the toll the economy has taken on the people.
Further data taken from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ.... Japan has a Gini coefficient of 38, better than the 48 of the United States of America, but still worse than such famously underdeveloped countries as Cambodia or Jordan, or badly-off First World countries like Italy or Greece, let alone such highly developed nations as the United Kingdom or Germany.
You shouldn't brag about your prosperous egalitarianism when you've been in a deflationary depression for 25 years and your Gini coefficient is in the "not quite as bad as America" range.
As a Japanese I understand your sentiment; now I live in US and I don't praise the huge disparity in the US society neither.
However, your argument is misleading. In Japan, gap doesn't exist as much between occupations as in US, but between employment status; whether if you're a "proper" member of the company (正社員), usually hired right out of school and expected to spend your entire career there, or not. Even if one do the same amount of work, a proper member generally gets much higher pay, enjoys various benefits, and is protected well from layoffs. It's ironic that you brought up nobleness---in a sense, the proper member is regarded more noble, because they swear allegiance to the company, thus payed higher, regardless of what they actually do.
I like your world-view on this but I also think that the Nordic countries get just about everything right and am notoriously oblivious to money so perhaps that is why.
Let me counter your argument as an American living in Japan (though not working).
> Not because their job is inherently more noble than the lowly paid ones
In Japan engineers are treated like janitors because that's how Japanese businesses view other non-sales non-management positions within the company. The bosses decide the direction of the company, and everyone down to the janitors and engineers follow those orders. If you aren't a manager, you have less responsibility and thus less power to decide or give feedback to the overall health of the business.
In America, engineers often have more input to their superiors. In fact it isn't uncommon for engineers to assume management positions in American large corporations. I would even argue a manager with an engineering background will preform better than just a manager with an MBA. But even the lowly intern is allowed to speak up to his superiors because discussion even if it is against management's wishes is valued.
This isn't true in Japan. The path to "nobility" in Japan is to work (study) your way to the most reputable university out of high school to give yourself the best chance at entering the most reputable firms in Japan.
This is why schools like Keio that are an all inclusive program for children from primary school all the way through university are so popular (for Americans, this system nearly guarantees children entry to Keio University which is to Japanese a sort of Ivy league school). They're trusted to give their students the best possible outcomes in structured Japanese society because they're reputable.
So while you may delude yourself into thinking that Japan is egalitarian, it is anything but. It is a mixture of meritocracy to a certain point with old feudal caste style concepts mixed in.
> But what if the market is set up in a way that both salaries are roughly equalized? This is somewhat how the Japanese salary system works, and I believe this is The Better Way.
This isn't the better way. This is a tendency towards socialism. Not that I disagree with the socialist philosophy. In many ways I wish America was more like Europe. But from what I have seen in Japan, this mentality allows for the idea of 仕方ない (shikata ga nai) or status quo mentality.
That is most Japanese have the idea that they can't effect change within society because that's just the way things have always been done and that's just how it is. Contrast this with America's acceptance and encouragement to change and create changes. This difference is the reason why America has continued to last as it has for so long in addition to coming to dominating the world even when large industries have been off-shored.
There are some downsides to America's behavior. Notably we don't preserve traditions and culture. But at the same time this allows for innovation. It attracts the best and brightest in the world because that's the promise: you can do what you need to change the world and that glory will forever belong to your name as long as books and information continue to be preserved.
For example Japan has had a number of major visionaries, business men, and inventors but most of them are not respected within Japanese society because they didn't fit in. The most recent being Shuji Nakamura (Nobel prize winner for blue LED manufacturing discovery) who was Japanese but has since nationalized to America. Nakamura sued his previous Japanese employer over compensation for his discovery which was a mere 20,000 yen (~$200 USD) at the time. If that's the reward for advancing society, then nobody will want to attempt to do the impossible. Instead everyone will just throw their hands up and demote themselves to the easiest and most stable work possible which is exactly what you're seeing in Japan these days. But they have another option: immigrate to America where they will be respected.
It is sad to say but I believe if Japan continues on the trend they are on right now, they will continue to sink into irrelevancy. Japanese citizens are not trained to be specialized, they're trained to fit into society. Those that fit in the best and devote themselves to the structured nature of Japan are best respected. Those that find other ways or do not follow the traditional path (the Japanese version of the corporate ladder) are not respected. So when a serious problem in Japan arises, if the leaders do not recognize it, and have the correct solution, the entire ship sinks. Because only the leaders are in the position to effect change. Not the janitors. Not the engineers.
Finally a recent popular drama that aired in Japan was Hanzawa Naoki. (Spoiler alert) In the drama, the main protagonist spends his time ethically climbing the ranks of a large national bank in order to exact his revenge on a board member of the bank that he believes caused his father to commit suicide. He's successful but in the end, he's demoted from his current rank and transferred out of the main branch (because he forced the board member to kneel down and apologize in the most humiliating way during a board meeting). When I asked my Japanese friend what she thought of the drama's ending, she just replied, "that's just how it is." She didn't bother to think for once if a better outcome was possible.
Thank you for an excellent argument. I actually agree with you overall, and indeed I don't think Japan is an egalitarian society at all. However, I don't think the financial egalitarianism necessarily implies the status quo mentality, although it is a sad coincidence here for now. I think it is possible to create a financially egalitarian society while advocating changes. No idea how, but that's beyond my point. Either way, I think people getting paid equally for vastly different jobs is saner. It is more of a manifestation that there's something that cannot be transferred to monetary value.
Japanese financial egalitarianism is also, to a certain degree, a statistical mirage. At higher internal statuses inside the company, it will simply anticipate your desires and provide for them, rather than you ever needing to sully yourself with money. The IRS takes a rather dim view of this and has since the reforms in, IIRC, the 1970s, which treat perks as taxable income. The National Tax Agency theoretically disapproves of them but the actual practice in Japan is that companies get away with things that would get your entire accounting division jailed in the US.
For example, a Japanese CEO might have a salary of 4x that of his youngest salaryman. However, he also drives a $200k car. It is not "his" car, it is the company's car, but aside from the name on the title you could be excused for not knowing that. He's also homeless, if you discount the $10 million house which happens to be owned by the company's real estate arm which he happens to live in.
After he's CEO emeritus, he'll probably be provided with a board seat, a job at an affiliated company, or what have you, and the perks will continue, as befits someone of his stature.
This is true at all levels of the company, too. My salary was $30k, but there is some tangible value in having a pocket full of business cards which practically read "Attention, person who has just been handed this card: give the bearer whatever he wants. We're good for it. If you don't, we will remember." That status is very much not the same as the one you get if you combine two part-time jobs into the same level of income.
Speaking of emeritus employees: When do salarymen retire? What happens after that? Does the salaryman finally get to see that beach in Hawaii that his wife has been visiting every year, or does the pension not always stretch that far? Do the perks keep going after retirement even for the non-CEOs?
Typically, exactly at the age the company forces you to. I believe it was 65 at my company.
A company pension is typically sufficient to sustain one to a reasonable middle class standard of living, historically, and you have the option of being hired by the same company as a contract employee while receiving it. There's some grumbling about that, as of late, but my sense of it is that the material situation of salarymen who came up in the 1970s right now is pretty decent, but one might not say that about e.g. retired men who were working in the factories as contract labor during the same time.
You can pick out the retired gentlemen on the train fairly easily. The outfit is usually a Western suit a few decades out of date. Tweed is popular.
Some take up hobbies and become/remain pillars in their community. (Former salarymen are rather common among e.g. active members of my parish. The words "I left the company and joined Catholicism" might have been mentioned once, to a bit of chuckling and some scandalized looks in the direction of the parish priest.)
Some have the troubles one generally associates with aging. That is particularly difficult for salarymen who don't have a personal social network (due to never marrying, divorce, estrangement from family due to being absent for 30 years, etc).
Do the perks keep going after retirement even for the non-CEOs?
It depends. I know one guy who is clearly on The Track, and regardless of whether he makes CEO or not, I expect that he expects to be taken care of indefinitely. I'm not sure if one can expect that if you're not one of the golden boys.
They're each contributing the same: one person's worth of work.
The article discusses the idea that when you're hired you're given a career that the company decides on, not you. So in that context, where they'll turn an art history major into a java developer, things are different.
The Japanese system is predicated on the idea that salarymen are fungible, and in that context your personal skills or contributions don't factor in. You're the same as everyone else, and if every one of a company's 80,000 employees is functionally identical from the point of view of the system, there's no real line between a programmer and a janitor.
> They're each contributing the same: one person's worth of work.
You're talking about effort and he's talking about value, which are quite different metrics.
A programmer uses a crazy work multiplier known as a computer to affect, potentially, millions or even billions of lives (in the cases of Google or Facebook).
A janitor cleans a small area and generally won't affect as much, in addition to being more easily replaceable due to being unskilled labor that does not require all that training.
For what it's worth, I say that having worked jobs not far removed from janitor.
I've worked on Japanese dev teams, and I've always liked the Japanese geeks I've worked with. They're usually out of the running for "serious" jobs at the company, so they tend to be much more relaxed and fun than the "important" people.
But I'm not at all convinced that most of them could make much more money outside Japan. I've almost always had to communicate with Japanese devs in Japanese, because few of them spoke much English. They tended to be kids who didn't do all that well in school, including English class, so they didn't go to prestigious universities, whose students tend to go into more respected professions.
Things might have changed since I lived there, but Japanese devs were not valued very highly in Japan and most would have a hard time being more valuable outside Japan.
It is probably fair to say that each hour of labor is worth the same pay regardless of the job (ignoring market rates, etc). However, the reason I think things like programming or other high skill labor should be worth more, is it does actually involve more labor. First, I had spent at least 4 - 6 hours a day learning the craft, from the time I was 13 years old, improving at a steady rate. Still spend a good 3 - 4 hours a day keeping up. Some skilled crafts also involve a lot of formal education, in addition to many hours of practice. Add on top of that -- when I go home, I'm still constantly thinking about my craft, and problems that I'm currently working on. Therefore, for each hour I'm at work, I probably have spent at least 2 - 3 hours outside of work (either currently, or from past learning).
This is such a typical defeatist mentality that I've seen not just in Japan but amongst East Asian engineers. It's treated as some sort of menial job, there's no pride or passion in it's practice, and that's why it's so easy to be exploited.
The market is not the law or the most efficient state, it is easily influenced by large entity or a conglomerate of businesses with the common interest of depressing the costly side of their business.
To say that because the market pays a bit over what janitors are paid seems very much lacking in confidence and quite frankly, self degrading. You won't get anywhere with that kind of attitude, Japan or America.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the US salaries drop in the coming decade. CS classes are incredibly impacted and universities are churning out students. Sure the quality of your average graduate is plummeting too, but that's never completely factored-in when you apply to a job
Actually, the number of CS and Engineering degrees as a percentage of all awarded degrees hasn't appreciably changed -- 8.1%, slightly up over the past several years but still significantly below the ~9% average of the 1990s and 1985's high-water mark of 14.1%. With CS-related employment growing at twice the projected job growth average, I don't see the modest number of CS grads negatively affecting sector wage growth.
Most CS students at my universities were international students for the past 15 years. Even if all were to stay in the US, the immigration laws for foreign are designed to protect the US jobs. So unless the laws and demand for workers change, I doubt salaries would drop.
One thing concerning cost of living: Tokyo is definitely way less expensive than San Francisco now. Unless you're trying to live 5 minutes away from Roppongi or something, there's loads of affordable apartments and the like (no comments on houses).
I agree with this. I moved from SF to Tokyo 2 years ago, and for almost the exact same price as my studio apartment in downtown SF, which was tiny and the bathroom was covered in mold, I have an apartment about 15-20 mins out of Shinjuku in a building that was brand new when I moved in.
I was also pleasantly surprised at the cost and quality of food here, although some of my coworkers who moved here from different countries (South Africa, for example) have complained that it's too expensive.
My bills are also less expensive, and the quality of the services are better. Internet for example is very fast and reliable, and costs me about half the price as Comcast did in SF.
I worked in the game industry in Japan and the salaries were terrible. Salaries were half or less compared to California, while the cost of living in Tokyo was similar (at least back then, it could easily be more expensive in the Bay Area now). I ended up leaving my job to do consulting from home for clients both in Japan and abroad and more than doubled my income.
Living abroad was a a great experience though. The process of studying a new language and using it in day to day life successfully was incredibly satisfying. I'd love to do that again in another country.