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Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

That seems very counterproductive to me, who will want to go work in Konami once this behavior is known? This will probably severely hamper their ability to recruit, especially recruit experienced people.

Am I missing something? Perhaps it's more common in Japan's video game industry to work in the same place for life?

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Actually the video game industry is one of the more labor liquid industries in Japan. Teams leave, producers with track records go solo, key guys get poached, etc.

Definitely more liquid than manufacturing, finance, insurance, IT consulting, publishing, aerospace, shosha, semiconductors, etc.

Do you have examples of key guys getting poached in the Japanese market? From my experience here most people tend to stay a long time or move on their own will (not as often as US IMO though)

The Tactics Orge team from Quest getting poached by Square back around 1995.

It seems like Konami wants out of the video game business altogether, or at least mostly out, preferring focus on licensing their properties to gambling machines and their other interests, because they believe recent changes to gambling laws will make the latter a more profitable market than the former. If the stories about the way Konami employees were treated recently (not even including Kojima) are to be believed, then it seems Konami decided that they couldn't care less about their existing talent, much less their reputation with potential new hires.

Although, it does seem weird that they burned their bridges with the gaming community so very, very hard, and a great deal of the value in their IP with them.

It's already known, and every better creative and engineer already left them. They just went with the leader Kojima to his new company.

The old habits of life long work with the same company stopped around 2000. It got much better.

It's Japan. There isn't real competition for talent - one is hired out of school, depending on the school he attended, and that's pretty much it. "Abandoning" a company is seen as suspiciously disloyal.

In exchange for that, most companies reward employees with jobs for life, seniority-based career progression, housing and health perks, vacation trips and so on.

IT and gaming are more dynamic than others but the mainstream attitude is still the zaibatsu one.

The environment you're describing is 20, perhaps even 30 years out of date. It definitely used to be the case but much less so now, and only in the largest and most traditional companies - certainly not "most" and the last percentage I heard was around 10%. And only from the top universities (Keio, Tokyo U, Waseda etc)

I personally know people who have been headhunted for their talent/experience (in finance though) so it is a thing. Not as much as in the west, true, but it does happen.

Its a thing, but its in no way the norm. The college students I taught at a mid-tier university pretty much all expected to find work before graduation and expected that would be the only time they would need to job hunt. I had a couple students that seriously considered extending their education into graduate school just because they hadn't had much luck in finding a job by the end of their junior year. Switching companies isn't the death sentence for your career like it once was, but it is not the norm outside of a few select industries that are hurting for talent. You'll almost certainly be taking a pay cut in pretty much every other industry.

> The college students I taught at a mid-tier university pretty much all expected to find work before graduation

They can expect whatever they like but I'll bet at least a portion of them will end up disappointed. Things are not what they were.

Select industries maybe - my point was that job-hopping, headhunted or not, is not the universal poison it once was, and as a GP purported it to be. It's still more taboo than in the west, yes. But it's not career suicide and the taboo weakens year by year, as it should. Kicking and screaming and all that...

It's much more common in all Japanese industries to work in the same place for life.

> Perhaps it's more common in Japan's video game industry to work in the same place for life?

Yes: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

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