Uniqlo dangles $8.8M salaries to draw talent in Big Tech showdown
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
Which mid-level engineer in SV makes $9M ? IIRC ~L6/L7 salaries at Google are around ~$1M, and I think they are ~40% lower in Tokyo. I remember seeing a similar news piece for NEC a few years ago - about how the salaries can go as high as $1M.
Meanwhile, even those tech workers who do chose to work there in Tokyo have been stranded out of Japan for ~1.5y now; and unlike the US, which despite falling birth rates and a lack of interest in Tech from the natives, manages to keep its industry afloat with an endless supply of grad-students from India/China, Japan has basically shut itself off to STEM students too.
I'm not sure if they have their priorities straight for a tech ecosystem. Which is surprising (and a bit tragic), considering that Tokyo was neck-and-neck with SV until before the internet boom.
Basically no one offers that out of the gate. Even L6 at Google is not going to be anywhere near $1m. L7 isn't either. If you notice - all the L7 samples at Google on levels are people who have significant tenure at the company and thus lots of appreciation.
Only way you're getting $1m+ as a software eng IC at any tech company is by being a celebrity, extremely rare specialist, or - the most common way - through stock appreciation. There are plenty of L5/L6 eng out there making $1m+/yr (I was one) but that's entirely due to stock appreciation and that's it. $9M/yr is definitely an outlier and would only be experienced by early eng at $10B+ valuation company.
https://cleanclothes.org/news/2020/uniqlo-and-the-women-owed...
Have a friend deposit some clothes in a booth => go get the clothes => checkout with all those clothes for free
Retail theft, in general, is not the problem people seem to think it is.
When I was in university, a roommate made it a habit of ringing out several pounds of alcohol as celery in self checkout on a monthly basis. They got caught after years of this behavior. Probably thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands in theft. Their only punishment was a slap on the wrist (don't come back to this specific store).
It's a national epidemic in the US and is presently thrashing just about every major retailer. Huge store changes are coming because of that this decade and it'll be ugly.
Amazon can photograph/record the criminals all they want, stores already do that. If they try to stop the criminals from leaving, they're setting up a hyper dangerous violent confrontation scenario with the criminal and the customers still in the store (you do not want that under any circumstances, you want to just let the criminal go). Amazon will do the obvious thing and not stop the criminal after a few customers get murdered in the store from a thief that flips out after getting 'caged,' if they're dumb enough to try to stop them (and or Amazon gets a few customer hostage scenarios). Nobody in power in US urban areas gives a shit about any of this any longer, the US is collapsing in the style of a Latin American Socialist paradise (see: Los Angeles rail thefts). No laws, increasing corruption, and it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. Strip mine the US for the $$$ and get the hell out, that's all it's good for now, and the clock is ticking on that (inevitable far higher taxes in exchange for nothing better (the higher taxes are just to pay for past spending mistakes, debt, at this point) + value debasement from USD Fed damage will considerably erode that equation's effectiveness over the next ~20 years).
Pray tell, when did this begin? When was theft at stores, what seems to you the harbinger of societal apocalypse, not an issue in the United States?
Yet here it is, happening under Capitalism. You can't point at a failure of capitalism and say "look, Socialism!!"
I don’t think people will engage in shoplifting in these types of stores, since you give a lot of personal information through your Amazon account, which would facilitate prosecution. [0] http://justwalkout.com/
Still pretty impressive!
They already have that large database, those purchases are all already tracked and associated with a customer (to the extent they can depending on context). If you buy something at a major retailer, you'll get a receipt with a transaction number on it, with all the items of course on the receipt; the retailers are usually permanently warehousing that data. The data is text and trivial and gets easier to store closer to active space every day that passes (as opposed to only keeping the huge piles of data on ice; you want it rapidly accessible if you need to always be able to check for any transaction in the past, eg in that scenario of past items coming into the store from who knows when).
EDIT: I was not even aware of when they had taken my photo.
These tags are very cheap ~1cent per and can be embedded directly into the clothes stitching.
“I’ll explain later, dear.”
I also wrote a prescient short story, titled "Smart Furniture", published 20+ years ago, where the protagonist's day job was driving past people's houses to scan the tags on the interior, and he considered himself "better" than those folks who stood around in malls scanning the clothing of people as they pass by and accosting them with special offers. The ultimate form of "browser fingerprinting" in a way.
Google themselves has ad offerings making this fairly easy.
It mentions > its headquarters had about 1,600 employees, mostly midcareer hires... The average pay is about 9.6 million yen.
Also the job description does not mention software engineers, but "logistics" and such.
I think it is 8.8 million yen for non-tech salaries.
This is much more believable for Japan, where salaries in larger organizations tend to be very structured, and typically not on the high side.
Most cushy jobs offer QoL benefits via non-salary perquisites of some sort or another, and these can be substantial.
Edit: Another possibility is that the $8.8m is the total amount that will be spent on mid-career hires. That would be about right if they bring on 100 people at ~$88k each, and the article mentions bringing on 100 or “even 200” new mid-career hires.
Those are some big words.
MAMAA (Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon)
or
GAMMA (using G for Google but not F for Facebook seems incosistent but it's a better acronym overall)
Are you concerned Nike might steal Apple’s computer design know-how?
And sure, maybe the fashion eites of the world all use Apple products, but that’s more a consequence of the duopolies and a lack of choice for consumers rather than any actual merit of the brand itself.
https://cleanclothes.org/news/2020/the-devastation-of-covid-...
Although I must say the quality of their products had been on a sharp decline since even before the pandemic. The fit remained scary consistent though.
for an example, hint: the gag for me (maybe unseen on the photos of their 'Strickwaren' made in Frankfurt) was Criss Cross wearing they clothes 'wrong side' an they (the label VM) thought and presented 30y ago , that 'it is posible, we can do this' ...local, page: //www.velvetmonkeesshop.com/VM-STRICK-PULLOVER-p123861920 , also nice that they wrote 'Felix is 188cm and wears size...' (-:
and um no i am not involved or getting tantieme by that comapany, this anecdotical posting was just for your entertaiment, regards...
edited, 'wrong link' sry
> For me by the way that sounds like a good reason to 'buy local'
I was under the illusion that locally made business-casual style clothing would be difficult to find. A very quick search was all it took to bust that idea, and make me feel ridiculous for thinking it in the first place.
More expensive, naturally, but the price difference is minimal - not much more than a small uptick.
This is enrichment :)
“So… I’m making $200k a year and you said…”
To me this shows Yanai's head is in the right place, but the question of how you achieve this in a big company. Offering big salaries is of little use if you can't create an environment conducive to iterating fast on big ideas. Essentially you need startup people, but in general startup people will be eaten alive by big company politics. Even in SV where you have more crossover it's still a rare breed that can do both. I have no idea if Uniqlo fits the stereotypical Japanese corporate culture, but if the senior ranks are full of lifers with a conservative bent then Yanai has his work cut out for him.
Guess it's not loading for me either.
>The company was not involved in clothing design and manufacturing, and instead obtained its products from the wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou. In 2014, Shein acquired Romwe, another Chinese e-commerce retailer, making it a "fully integrated retailer." In 2020, Shein was the most talked about brand on TikTok and Youtube and the 4th most talked about brand on Instagram.
Shein seems to be a frontend to the Chinese clothing industry. They are faster and cheaper than traditional retailers, which should include Uniqlo. If Uniqlo wants or has to compete, they have to build a similar platform in a fraction of the time.
Maybe they also want to expand into virtual reality and such, then they have to become a software company. After all, they sell fashion and not textiles. If people spend their money on hats and armor in games, then they have to be there, and not in a shopping mall.
My first commit: Don't hide text on links on job opportunities page.
I think it's the "mid-career" that's misleading here. They're really looking for the top, actual world-class talent with those potential salaries. In which case they aren't so insane.
Eg they want very senior talent and are willing to outbid Amazon, etc.
Did they pay one guy or something and now we have an article?
So they’re probably looking for one CTO with $8.8m comp, and a ton of engineers for $100-200k.
Not clear how that could be a bad translation, at least it seems unlikely since then it raises the question of why the currency conversion came out to a nice round number.
Money can alleviate those risks but not fix them fully.
- parts of the country are defacto independent of the state
- can hire a private army for security
- short hop on a private DC-8 to world class health care in the gulf
> TOKYO -- The operator of the Uniqlo chain of casual apparel stores will pay midcareer hires up to 1 billion yen ($8.8 million)
I don't see any possibility that this is accurate as reported.
Extremely low and high wages drive people away, but for different reasons.
When the company is successful all credit goes to the CEO, and when they fail blame goes to everyone else as the CEO takes time to be with family with their golden parachute worth millions.
The era of the cult of CEO needs to end, it's become grotesque.
The CEO isn't getting paid this amount.