Software engineer and farmer living in rural Japan.
If you’re looking for a remote senior software engineer (most recently golang, but I’ve worked in a little bit of everything in the last 20 years), I’d love to hear from you. Japan PR, Canadian and US citizenship. Native English speaker, proficient Japanese, learning Norwegian (now between A2 and B1, though listening/speaking is lagging a bit due to lack of chance to practice), and some very rusty German and French I could get back to speed on.
Japanese companies can’t lay off permanent employees without triggering things like hiring freezes and other consequences. They’re usually put in shit jobs to force them to quit (though this can be illegal) or are offered a buyout for several months of salary to quit.
when the original dev leaves and nobody understands the code
In my experience at work, no one cares about this. They assume the AI will be able to get there with enough tokens/time with the help of the human at the other end. They have done this and decided it was good enough.
Meanwhile, people like me who don’t use AI coding agents and are PRing and modifying the code are having a hell of a time.
I first used it in the '90s so a resounding yes.
More recently, trying to get video editing software to work properly and not break as soon as I upgrade was the one. Also I couldn’t get a bunch of HAM stuff working properly on Mint and I just don’t have time to throw at it.
I forgot all about Enlightenment. Also, no Mandrake Linux?
The app gets messed up on my Japanese LG TV every now and again (and I seem to have lost the ability to thumbs-up videos again), but it’s never been unusable. The app on my android phone looks fine at the moment.
If a company wants to get rid of a permanent employee, they have very limited tools when it’s non-consential. If they claim it’s financial, they have to (in theory at least) prove that to unilaterally dismiss and that can come with the burden of freezing hiring and other things.
To unilaterally dismiss otherwise, they need to prove gross/malicious bad conduct, performance problems (this still requires a long PIP process), or reassign the employee somewhere and have the employee refuse. For the last one, it can’t legally be too onerous to on the employee, but case precedent is hit or miss if it makes it to court. As I understand, most prefer to settle out of court and pay the employee to go away.
In my mind, layoffs are for downsizing head count rather than firing which is targeted to that employee.
As I understand it, certain numbers of actions to reduce headcount can also trigger things like hiring freezes, but I don’t know much about that.