(keitai-l) Re: employment question

Curt gives good advice incl. the one about schmoozing(I know many foreigners
here in Tokyo who are total morons but get paid very very well due to their
people skills, which are yes, necessary skills.)
I just add a comment:
I am assuming the kind of tech job a foreigner may be pursuing in Japan
might pay so much that is it a possibility to hire an intrepreter/secretary
as official part of your employment package or at least as a temp staff who
comes in on certain days for the japanese language assistance needed
meetings?  If I were a smart Japanese corp(although not many around due to
bureaucratic restrictions), I would rather hire a foreigner who did the job
right even if it meant having a temp interpreter hang around because it may
cheaper than having to fix the tech work of a less capable person.
Gene

----- Original Message -----
From: "Curt Sampson" <cjs@cynic.net>
To: <keitai-l@appelsiini.net>
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003 9:04 AM
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: employment question


>
> On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Conor wrote:
>
> > What I want to know is, what qualifications do employers over here
> > usually require, and what level of Japanese is expected.
>
> Well, I won't claim to have seen a whole lot of the job market in Japan,
> but about a year ago my dot-com here dot-bombed, and I had to go out
> hunting for a new job.
>
> The biggest problem I found, after the downturn, was that it became
> much, much harder to find a job that did not require reasonably fluent
> Japanese. I suspect that when companies really needed to hire people,
> they were willing to live with people who would have to do some work in
> English, but now that there are a lot of programmers and techies out
> there on the market looking for work, they would need a really, really
> good reason to hire an English speaker. (Most of them had no interest
> at all in me once they found out my Japanese is very poor, and I've had
> more than ten years experience in the industry, have run the entire
> technical side of an ISP, and am in general pretty good at what I do.)
>
> As far as learning Japanese, I'd recommend that you start studying kanji
> right away. If you can't deal with e-mail, you're probably not going to
> get far in a computer job. And kanji isn't as hard as some people make
> it out to be, either; after two years here I can in fact read better
> than I can understand spoken conversations. (Not that either is great--I
> wouldn't consider my Japanese adequate for a Japanese-only workplace.)
> But it's a bit tough, because there aren't a lot of resources out
> there to help you learn kanji as you learn basic Japanese; most of the
> stuff for English speakers tries to keep you as far away from kanji as
> possible.
>
> Anyway, the most important thing you can do in Japan, as far as getting
> a job goes, is the same as anywhere else: schmooze. I've never yet
> gotten a job through a recruiter; it's always been via knowing the right
> person at the right time.
>
> cjs
> --
> Curt Sampson  <cjs_at_cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
>     Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC
>
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