I feel like ranting a bit.
I think I am adapting pretty well to the culture here, and most things don't bother me. However, I am having a bit of trouble at my workplace. I am working for a 100% Japanese IT company, and I am the only foreigner there. For a Japanese company, it is quite relaxed and easygoing in some ways, but the work methods and principles are still very Japanese.
Coming from a work culture where solutions and results are the priority, I am having a tough time adapting to this superficial way of working. At the company, we provide IT consultation and services to other companies. In this recent project, we are consulting a smaller company that is not familiar with IT solutions and IT security. From my perspective, it is our job to advise them on the best ways to modernize their systems and adopt modern security policies. However, the rest of my team prioritizes following the customer's every request to the letter, no matter how impractical the request is. As IT consultants, it should be our job to guide the customer to make good decisions and teach them modern IT solutions. Instead, it is just "かしこまりました" and moving on as the customer wants to set a 12-digit PIN code for sign-ins. "かしこまりました" when the customer doesn't want to use multifactor authentication in their systems because it is something new to them.
In my opinion, good customer service in Japan is a myth. You'll get very polite customer service, but it is not necessarily good customer service.
OK, so my team doesn't prioritize solutions and consulting. What do they prioritize? They make sure every Excel sheet, PowerPoint, and user manual is perfect to the last detail.
"Oh no, this screenshot has a black border instead of a gray border. Please fix it."
"In this Excel sheet, there's an extra space here. Please delete it."
And about user manuals: every manual is written with the expectation that the reader has never seen an iPhone, PC, or any electronic device, even if it is made for another IT consultant.
85% of my time in this project goes to creating Excel sheets, manuals, and PowerPoints. 15% goes to testing and implementing the actual settings. As an IT engineer who is used to troubleshooting, figuring out solutions, and consulting customers, this can be frustrating.
Thanks for reading.
by Rokitty
26 comments
Based. Accurate
Welcome to Japan. This is happening in other industries so you’re not alone 🤣
If you want to have influence on implementation/and care about the practicality of a solution, you should get a job as an engineer doing in-house development, no?
I thought consultants basically just do what the customer wants.
Genuinely asking, I’ve never worked in this country before, I’m just a lowly language school student.
The term ‘order takers’ is used here often
This kinda reminds me of my previous workplace where from before I was hired to the day I left the company we had an ongoing IIOT project for our factory – in which I was heavily involved as I was an IT guy fluent in English and the CEO LOVED working with foreign startups to seem more international despite 98% of his workforce not speaking a lick of English.
Half a year in he hired a consultant for the project since it was going nowhere. The guy was quite vocal and efficient at first, but a few months into our procedures and reporting and goal setting sessions and endless slogans and whatnot, it was obvious he’d given up on advising the CEO on anything. It was just yes sir, you’re right sir, if this meeting ends this very minute I’m fine with whatever the hell you say sir.
I asked him once in private why he keeps putting up with the way this is going (since it was clearly going nowhere) – his honest reply was “Because he keeps paying me”.
I am so glad I do not have to go through that anymore lol
Just be happy and gratefull you are not the guy who has to code the whole 1 year project in the last week from scratch for minimum wage.
On the topic of manuals, even the lower level IT ‘consultants’ at my company give up if even one thing goes weird or wrong while following them. They just give up and ‘escalate’ lol. If the IT folks are like this you can imagine how it is for employees who know nothing about computers.
You are right about documents, and the sheer amount of tickets related to fixing a single paragraph.
I am not exactly the only foreign origin person in our IT department, but I feel that everyone else bootlicks the Japanese employees because of Japanese culture or whatever-
Non verbatim “They’re Japanese, we should respect them and do whatever they want even if it goes against best practices”
I feel I am practically the only one who says “no” to people when necessary.
Also to add: I feel like lots of people do random silly things with their devices and then complain when something goes wrong. I got a ticket where someone turned off automatic sending and complained the emails stay in the outbox and don’t send *rolls eyes*
Not that all of these are limited to Japan. But I have worked abroad before coming here and it wasn’t like this, so it really makes you think.
Edit: also one thing that really grinds my gears are employees expecting IT to fix an external company’s issues. Oh their emails are being blocked by their antivirus and we can’t receive it, can you fix it?
This is one of the fatal flaws of this country, and a big reason of why I dislike it here so much. This country relies on a superficial keeping of the peace that means that not much actually gets done. Abiding to the letter of the manual means that so much time is wasted on things that actually dont matter and makes life in reality so much harder for so many people, but nothing will ever change because its “how it is.”
Your point about the user manual reminds me of when I bought a new phone from Samsung Harajuku. As you’d expect for a flagship Galaxy store, the shop is modern and stylised very well to Samsungs branding, employees are young and can wear hoodies, interactsble tablets everywhere. Despite the very modern presentation, when it came to buying a phone the staff brought out this huge laminated binder with excel pages printed showing the prices of the models, which I then had to fill out a form by hand to purchase. It was like the tablets and phones were just compulsory props
You work for a bad IT company. There are Japanese IT consulting companies that do as you say, rather than what your company does.
Shop around.
If that small client of yours has any brains, they will outgrow your current company as they realize that having a consultant just do what they say doesn’t lead to long lasting solutions. The client will eventually see your company as unscrupulous and just using the client as a temporary income source. Which is what it is.
These are all valid points. But you are not the customer. It’s possible, even likely, that your colleagues know what the customer wants. If the choice is between giving the customer what they prefer, or what you prefer, the former is probably better for business.
I work in a different industry, and work with both foreign and Japanese clients. There is quite a big divide between what these clients want. Being able to identify that and adjust service to fit each is necessary, otherwise we would lose one group of clients. Like you, my idea of “good service” is not so aligned with many of our Japanese clients, so I focus more on foreign clients. My local colleagues understand local clients more, and I trust their judgement, in that regard.
You’re working for a company that dispatches IT “Consultants” in name only. In reality they are just there to provide some hands to get some slightly specialized tasks done. Renown consulting firms will provide more real “consulting” and the client will expect the same.
That being said, IT is considered a second or third tier job in this country, unfortunately. Particularly if you end up working for a large and established corporation, IT is generally not the best place to be.
Being a consultant is not just a contract work where you are doing what you are told to do, and not a superficial advisor job where you recommend whatever you think is a good practice and walk away.
Your job is to first, make your customer fuzzy, warm and happy and second, deliver whatever was promised by the proposal document.
It does require an experience, lots of groundwork and a certain sense in politics. If you don’t do these you will remain to be a contract worker with a “consultant” title.
By the way, some people here write about the old geezers doing old people’s things but my observation is the opposite of that: it is usually the young and inexperienced ones being the most stubborn and arrogant in their delusion of “Japan number one in tech”, while it is easier to make sense with Showa guys who have accepted that they don’t know what they don’t know.
>In my opinion, good customer service in Japan is a myth. You’ll get very polite customer service, but it is not necessarily good customer service.
yeah that just about nails it.
Japanese loves writting I believe! Did anyone observe that the amount of writings they do on blogs despite a comparatively smaller language? They’ve reading and writing!
Note to self: hire a Japanese IT company to come in and do documentation for all the systems at my US company.
I work for a company that’s trying to politely and respectfully push back on “the customer is god” when we work with our consulting clients.
As a foreigner working in Japanese with Japanese clients one of the things I learn from my Japanese coworkers is how to do this the “Japanese way”.
Communicating the correct things the correct way so the clients want to know more about the options other than what they requested.
It’s a slow process but I’ve seen improvement in my four years doing this.
Don’t lose heart.
Your company sucks and will be eaten alive by AI in the next 5 years.
Customer tells you what they want.
You advise customer based on what they want
Customer agrees or disagrees
You do what the customer wants after hearing your advice
Finished
As soon as you mentioned excel spreadsheet, I felt ptsd.
My last project is like this I was so pissed I quit. Like every requirement details, design, and DB schema are done in excel and it’s per PAGES (screen as they call it) even the tiny detail of text ID we need to put it in excel. I was so pissed that I was spending more time on documentation than on actual web development. So stupid
I’m an IT consultant myself and I worked in a big 外資系 consultancy firm here and now I’m working for a smaller but a Japanese one.
With clients it’s always the same. Whether big or small, they just want you to do what they say. Also had situations where they would ignore what I say but when a Japanese colleague said exactly the same thing they treated his words like a gospel. What makes it even funnier is how IT illiterate the people in charge are. But you are required to follow all requests or lose a client. Been struggling with this myself but now I just want them to pay me and sod off.
This is exactly what’s happening to me. I’m spending most of my time creating excel documents explaining each function on the web app for a customer to read it. I didn’t do anything related to IT for some time.
I always saw it as a blame game. If you recommend something and there’s ever a problem, it’s your fault. If you do exactly what the customer wants, it’s their problem. Banks and such pay big money for names like IBM, Fujitsu, Microsoft to implement solutions so if ever there’s a problem it’s the vendors fault.
This sounds just like my company, a small SAAS startup.
It’s funny that the things you are talking about are things which I complain about on almost a daily basis. At my company there is no vision or goal for our product: just follow the request of the customer.
Of course what happens is that two customers request different things on the same module and we end up with two separate specs for the same product, so we have two conflicting specifications that are impossible to implement together. And yes, oftentimes the things they ask for are completely useless and simply because it’s “what they are used to”.
Put on top of that a top down organizational structure with non technical managers who believe their opinion to hold more weight than engineers due to their position, and you have a recipe for disaster.
In fact over four years of software experience in Japan I’ve come to believe that this work culture is diametrically opposed to good software innovation, and I’m already making plans to move my career elsewhere.
Two thoughts
1 – you aren’t really an IT consultant / advisor but instead an outsourcing company. Which means you do what they say/ask and give accurate estimates rather than advise they didn’t ask for.
2 – if you are new and jr – even if more talented you need to fully learn the ropes (a few years following orders) before you try to tell your management how they should do their job.
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