Pros
* Free meals. * They'll sponsor your visa and pay a chunk to help you move to Japan (or at least they used to). * Good platform to jump to another company after a few months. * If you want a bank loan, they're considered a top-tier employer by banks for some reason. * Now the Maternity and Paternity leave policies are actually top-notch for a Japanese company, and they will actually follow through with supporting you taking the maximum 12 months (even for paternity leave). So it's a good possible workplace if you plan to have kids and want to be at home for their first year.
Cons
* Work-life balance is awful. * Corporate values are just something written on a piece of paper for most employees. * True mental health support is "lacking" shall we say. If you can't handle management gas-lighting, maybe steer clear. * LGBT+ support is mixed. Many part of the wider business don't care who you are in that regard, but there are a lot of quietly anti-LGBT people still around, and can be quite unpleasant. * Inconsistent ability to negotiate salary in interview stage (not at all in my case). * Middle-management of technical staff is largely non-technical or has low tech-knowledge levels compared to US/European companies. * Middle management appears to filter all upward communication through report lines. * Top-level appears to either be blind to low-level day-to-day reality, or delusional (and maybe sadistic in a number of cases). * Glass-ceiling on advancement. Most middle, and even low-level tech, management has been with the company for years. Promotion is highly political, and anything mid-level up is basically an old-boys club. * Compulsory early-morning whole-company meetings, that you get penalised for missing. * CEO constantly wanted people back in the office ASAP, despite clear evidence of the risks of COVID. * HR actively suppressed multi-thousand staff initiative to gauge and declare desire for on-going WFH or Hybrid set-up to senior management, then staged a limited and flawed questionnaire essentially painting an image that staff wanted to RTO (despite the suppressed evidence otherwise). * Last point also backed by many teams having actively declared both performance and satisfaction levels to have gone up with WFH. * Compensation on the lower end for IT work globally. Middling-low even for Japan. * Higher compensation grades will rob you of overtime pay (classed as Japanese labor management tier, ineligible for overtime, even if you have no management responsibilities). Many people get hired on these without being told in advance.
