How to survive working for a Japanese company?
"Survival of the fittest", guess that's the word to describe working in a Japanese company. First of all they require employees to understand and speak Nihongo, to do that they let you take Nihongo classes (in my case at least 3 times a week), which is supposed to be a good thing but because you are always busy and always in need to render overtime to catch up to every work, Nihongo class becomes troublesome. And FYI Japanese are very strict, in terms of quality and productivity, for example, you need to log all work or task you did every time like what time you started, to the time you finished. Sometimes you also need to be more specific of the given task (e.g. each task could be categorized to parts like investigation, coding, debugging etc.).
"You can't avoid Overtime", if your division or department is working on a big project, it's impossible not to have overtime, especially if your team is delayed, in my case going home after rendering 2 hours of OT is the earliest it can get.
"Work fast, or FASTER", when you're given a task evaluate your task and its given target time to finish, if you think you can't reach the due time, approach you leader and ask for extension. Because if you don't and you delayed your task, expect an interview( more like a hot seat ). So the best thing to do is to finish the task as soon as possible then try your luck on relaxing a bit, because the next task is already waiting for you.
"Never be late", punctuality is a great deal among Japanese, a punctual person who doesn't render much OT has more chance to get promoted to a person who renders 5hours OT.
It may seemed extremely harsh and it really is, it is also very competitive, but the only real good thing that you could get from all these is the experience. Your growth from working for Japanese companies is a lot better compared to local companies. Somehow it trains your body to adapt easily, to accept more knowledge in a short span of time, to be very flexible (I've done about 3 different task in just a month), to practice team work and to be very competitive.
All in all, if you survived and could excel working in a Japanese company, many companies will go after you.
