The first week of working in Tokyo
As I said before, I’m working for a small company located in Tokyo and it can be called an “IT dispatch company”. The company I signed a contract with is A but I work for company B. I worked in China for serveral years and last week was the fist week I’ve ever worked in a different country. Japan has its own uniq working style and IT is also inevitable. Because my Japanese is not good, so I cannot find a good site(referring to company B mentioned above). I accepted the offer even thouth I knew I would have to work overtime. You need to know the fact that,working as a software engineer for a traditional Japanese company, the most important skill you shoud have is Japanese, rather than programming.
The site is one-hour-tram ride away. I need to wake up at 7:00 AM every day. On the fist day I went there, I received a pass card that is used to get in or out. As sooon as I took my seat, the first thing I notced was the keyboard. It has a Japanese layout, and I’v never used one before. I was provided whith a desktop and a laptop. The laptop can only be used to connect to the desktop while at home via VPN. All of your work needs to be done on the desktop. The OS on the desktop is Windows and its language is Japanese. I tried to change it to English but failed. I don’t know why, and I searched for answers on Google, but still haven’t found a solution.
After giving up on changing the system language, I decided to review the code. It follows a standar MVC architecture, and I’ve never seen a project so simple ever since I graduated from university. It looks like a sample in a software engineing textbook. Each function is organized within its own package, and every package contains a set of controllers,services,DTOs. It didn’t take me long to understand the whole project. There is no cache, no message system in the project. Actually, I have no more to say about this project.
I usually took a nap at noon when I worked in China. All the companys I workd for had had a break of more than one hour at noon. It’s common in China to eat, tak a about one hour nap, and then start working at 2:00PM. Howerver, in Japan, it’s different. I only have a 45-minute break at noon, which only enough for lunch. It was against my daily routine, so I felt extremely sleepy and exhausted in the afternoon. Moreover, the rest of the day bacame quite boring as I had nothing to do. In fact, no one gave me any task until Wednesday. I had to read various Japanes documents that I could barely understand. Pretending you are busy is miserable. The official time of end of work time is 5:20 PM but I couldn’t leave because most of my colleagues were still at their position. I didn’t want to the first one to leave so I waited at my seat untill almost 7:00 PM.
The rest days of last week were repetitive, just like the fist day. All in all, it was not a good experience, I would say it was quite uncomfortable.