Pros
This is very much a traditional Japanese company (old-school), which basically means the following: - It is impossible to get fired due to the strict corporate policy of lifetime employment - The corporate branding is considered elite within Japan which opens many doors even for stuff that foreigners in Japan are systematically rejected for (credit lines, housing rentals, auto loans, housing mortgages) - Lots of patience on boarding fresh graduates and new hires - Decent employment benefits which are provided by an outsourced organisation - 20 days of annual leave from the start; majority of Japanese companies start at 10 after six months and increases leave entitlement by 1 day annually
Cons
All of the serious shortcomings associated with traditional Japanese companies consisting of, but not restricted to the following. Check with Google for the full listing. Please note that everything written here is strictly my own personal experience. - Atrocious employee treatment: You will be treated as a cog in the system here, make no mistake. The organisation comes first before everything else, even during important life events that have been scheduled and notified of months in advance. Individuals are singled out and shamed for even the most minute of errors, which is then followed up with said individual having to write a detailed report on why the error occurred and having to show remorse for "causing trouble to the organisation". Either bend over or be forcibly bent over and put into your place regardless of the logical merits or moral high grounds of your arguments. - Excessive corporate red tape: Micromanagement is taken to stratospheric levels here. Anything and everything is a KPI, which according to corporate policy requires a laundry list of documentation that clearly serve no purpose, countless rounds of changes mandated by everyone higher up the hierarchy, and convoluted rules that make no logical sense. Expect to send emails notifying that work has started and ended for even the most trivial tasks, and to submit daily work reports detailing every keystroke pressed that day. The phrase "too much of a good thing can be a bad thing" does not resonate here. - Feudalistic management: This ties in with the above. All decisions are made unilaterally top down yet management claims that it is bottom-up. Career advancement is based on one's depth of specialty yet management claims that it is based on one's breadth of experience across departments. Pay increases and promotions are strictly based on seniority yet management claims that the most competent get promoted. Department heads manage their respective departments as though it is their personal fiefdom. Not even the word hypocrisy can fully describe the festering rot starting from even bean-counting project managers. - Toxic office politics: Tons of tension exists between employees, who are busy trying to outmanoeuvre each other so as to grab the attention of someone important and hopefully get promoted. Certain project managers have no qualms lying outright to the whole team, before totally reversing course and backstabbing the whole team at critical junctures to receive a better performance review. As the rest of team is forced to pick up the pieces, subsequent infighting among the remaining members ensues so as to divert as much of the blame from themselves as possible. Following up every verbal correspondence with email during the course of every project is insufficient, unless one is willing to force every party to countersign against their statements. Either play the game, or be expected to shoulder all the blame at best, or fork out your own hard earned money to cover all the losses at worst. - Severely behind the technological curve: Projects are still managed using Microsoft Project printouts, tasks are tracked using Excel even if they number into the thousands, and reports have to be retooled for every submission be it to management or the customer. Never mind that countless solutions are readily available in the market to automate most of the tedium. Matured technologies from overseas undergo years of feasibility studies, before being offered to customers who are even more outdated than the organisation itself. Sales staff are considered profit centres whereas everyone else is considered a cost centre. A technology company this is not. - Wearing the mask of Globalisation: The company in recent years has started to establish overseas subsidiaries. Customers are strictly the overseas subsidiaries of existing clients in Japan, because of "superior Japanese quality". Never mind that the processes and technologies being utilised is matured enough to be considered end of support by their respective vendors (see above). Local hires are kept on the hook with vague promises of promotion to middle management while performing menial tasks that ought to have already been automated, while a rotating door of Japanese expatriates are parachuted into middle and upper management positions every 3 years, bringing with them all the negatives described in detail above. Nothing but a complete farce to expand and compete internationally. In short, NS Solutions is nothing but an old school Japanese company that has yet to fully realise that the world has long caught up and overtook Japan since its bubble economy imploded in 1991. In spite of being at least 5 to 10 years behind international standards in every aspect, the organisation goes out of its way to resist change and instead clings onto outdated ways of doing things which (1) absolutely makes no sense, (2) does not produce the desired outcomes. Employees are not respected, and are instead expected to fulfil every whim and desire of the organisation, going so far so to even making sure those in dead end career paths stay there.
