I understand the rest, but an otherwise capable person with a sick family member does not clear the bar for competent? Saddening if that’s where we are as a society.
I think the key part of that sentence was "...and just needs an advance", implying that they're going to take the job, ask for a cash advance for a (possibly fictional) sick family member, and immediately quit.
It’s easy to say that if you aren’t living a normal life here. Grocery receipts are growing faster than they ever have. It’s all small and incremental but enough to nearly double what we spent half a decade ago.
Keep in mind this is a country where new graduate salaries have been unchanging for the past 30 years. Even small rates of inflation is relatively devastating to certain groups.
Why would you suggest that I’m not living a normal life? It’s not like I’m here on an expat package (unfortunately).
The food price increases are noticeable, but even at my 21万 salary when I just got here they wouldn’t have been the end of the world. They’ve increased a lot, but they were also just insanely low before, so even with the increase it still feels reasonable.
I do think it’s heavily dependent on where you go. Some supermarkets are easily 50% more expensive by themselves.
Various Japanese websites actually have business hours, though it’s been getting better since 2020’s.
Imagine a banking app not allowing onboarding outside 8:30-18:30 Mon-Fri or a municipal site just saying come back at 8am.
The e-Tax system and various other government services still have these as well, mostly as daily maintenance windows. Some services use it to run data clean-up, consolidation, backup, etc. tasks so it’s not without reason.
They are franchised here as well, although the holding company owns multiple stores. The overall quality, including the operating hours to the chagrin of the franchisees, is ruthlessly maintained through their contracts and lawsuits though.
The US contracts might be more relaxed or the holding company might not have enough control due to the sheer size of the US market. In Japan, most stores get deliveries more than twice a day, have inspectors show up unannounced, need to make daily reports in some cases, etc. Not much room for leeway.
Not many software promises to fend off attackers, asks for an email address before download, and creates a bunch of processes using a closed source dll the existence of which can easily be checked.
Then again, not many malware targeting consumers at random check for security software. You are more likely to see a malware stop working if you fake the amount of ram and cpu and your network driver vendor than if you have CrowdStrike, etc. running.
My wage in terms of dollars have remained the same for the last 5 years despite earning double. It's not ruining my life only because it takes longer for prices to increase here -- but they are definitely increasing.
Japanese people also don't like talking about wages and not everyone compares what they are making to the dollar. I have heard plenty of colleagues, friends, and family complain. It's more about how the number of diapers in a bag has decreased steadily from 72 to 56 than boy my life is getting ruined by weak yen.
The more prevalent complaints are from fellow mortgage borrowers. Variable rates in Japan have been steady for nearly 30 years, meaning a substantial number of borrowers are watching the central bank's moves like a hawk and are terrified of even any talks of rate increases.
TLDR: We are just not loud complainers (and frankly, if any Japanese person you know is hopefully very lucky, they might be earning just enough to not notice it all)
I hear what you're saying about Japanese people not complaining as much, but I don't think it's just that. The only time they complain about 円安 is when they go abroad, which isn't very often.
The problem is a lot more noticeable for foreigners living in Japan temporarily because they don't think of their worth in the local currency. They then generalize their problems to the rest of the population.
When you think of your money in dollars, and you see it going down a lot, it looks like a life or death crisis. But the average person in Japan sees prices go up a bit, which is frustrating, but not to the same degree.
Given how Microsoft has been putting OpenAI models all over their products, I was 100% certain the title referred to including ChatGPT in Microsoft Teams and only surprised it wasn’t called Co-Pilot for Teams.
Fully agree. Unfortunately, not everyone wants a general direction. A list of things to do and by when so they can plan out their day and only do what’s necessary yields baseline expected results and frees you to give more attention to team members who do want the freedom to choose their tasks and contribute to strategy, etc.
Worst are the people who both don’t like the “I need you to …” task giving and do absolutely nothing when left alone or only given a goal and a direction. How do you deal with it if you are working on an industry where performance adjustments and feedback can take years and you can coast without doing anything four more than a couple of years?
