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Have you thought about doing the opposite of whatever you're doing or considering? It's a really helpful way to test your assumptions and your values. What does the opposite look like, how would it work? It's so easy to get stuck in a groove of what works, what you believe to be right. But helpful assumptions have a half-life, just like facts. And it's ever so easy to miss the shift when circumstances change, if you're not regularly stress-testing your core beliefs. That doesn't mean you're just a flag in the wind, blowing whichever way. But it does mean having enough intellectual humility and creative flexibility to consider that what you believe to be true about your business, about your team, about your technology might not be so. We did this a while back with full-time managers. We'd been working for nearly two decades without any, but exactly because it'd been so long, we were drawn to try the opposite, just to see what we might have missed. So we did. Hired a few full-time managers to help us test that assumption for a few years. In the end, we decided that our managers-of-one culture worked better, but it wasn't a given at the outset. To try the opposite, you really have to believe that you might have been wrong. Because you're wrong about something. I guarantee it. We all are.

When interviewing with a Japanese company, you’ll naturally want to know: “Is this a good place to work?” And while Glassdoor is the standard in English-speaking countries for employees leaving online reviews, the site is only rarely used in Japan, and then primarily by non-Japanese workers. Many countries have a culture that endorses directly reviewing employers in an open, public environment—Japan does not. However, there are still sites where you can find important information on your potential employer. What to watch out for In particular, you want to avoid signing on with a company that engages in exploitative practices—or as they’re known in Japan, a “black company” (ブラック企業, burakku kigyou). The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has a FAQ describing what defines these companies: Imposing extremely long working hours with high quotas. Recognition of workers’ rights is low throughout the company; unpaid overtime and/or workplace bullying (パワハラ, pawahara) are common. The company assigns shifts to workers without consent. The company discriminates among workers in the above circumstances. In a 2023 survey, those who had worked for such toxic companies listed high turnover rates as the most common sign that something was wrong, followed by long working hours and unpaid overtime. As you examine online review sites and other sources, look for clues such as: Turnover rate: how long do employees typically stay? Internal promotion: can you see employees rising in the ranks? Upper management: are there any non-Japanese employees in management positions? Recent company announcements: do they often make sudden pivots in their business policies? If you discover, for example, that the company can’t retain employees, shows no history of internal promotions, and has just issued a return-to-office order out of the blue, it’s safe to assume you don’t want to work there. OpenWork OpenWork, also known as Vorkers, hosts over 19 million company reviews. The reviews are represented in a radar chart for easy visual reference, and are also broken down into different categories, such as work-life balance, the ease of working for women, and reasons for considering quitting. In addition, applicants can post questions for employees to answer. If you don’t speak Japanese, the site is still readable with Google Translate. You’ll need to make a free account to see all of the information, but much of it is accessible even without an account. Other Japanese sites JobTalk and Engage Hyouban are other Japanese-language review sites. JobTalk contains 4.4 million reviews of around 230,000 different companies, and Engage Hyouban boasts 30 million reviews for 220,000 companies. Neither of these sites offer as much information on tech companies in Japan as OpenWork does. If you’re applying to a large company such as Rakuten, you may find some additional reviews there, but many of TokyoDev’s clients are smaller companies that aren’t listed at all. Google Maps Reviews An unusual but occasionally helpful place to find company reviews is on Google Maps. If you search for a business’s main corporate office location—usually in Tokyo—you will sometimes find reviews written by current or former employees. Whether these reviews are high-quality or trustworthy is another matter. Rakuten, for example, has reviews with a range of opinions. Cybozu, by contrast, mostly has reviews from those who would like to work for the company but currently don’t. Still, the reviews of its corporate office are consistently positive, so you can at least get an impression of the physical environment. LinkedIn “If you’re worried that a company might be a poor place to work, try contacting current or past employees via LinkedIn,” suggested Paul McMahon, founder of TokyoDev. “This probably works best if you’re late in the hiring process.” You can send a connect request saying, ‘I’ve received an offer from company X, and want to confirm what it’s really like to work there as an engineer. Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?’ Whether or not they respond, you can still glean good information from the profiles of past and current employees. Check to see if developers tend to leave the company quickly, for example, or how long the average employee goes before being promoted. You should keep in mind though that LinkedIn is not popular in Japan, for several good reasons. If you are applying to a primarily Japanese company, many of your future coworkers won’t be active there, which means you still may not be getting a complete picture. TokyoDev In 2020, TokyoDev began interviewing developers in order to provide a more complete, boots-on-the-ground picture of daily life at specific companies. Our Developer Stories feature interviews with developers at top Japanese tech companies, who share details about both their specific jobs and the general work environment. The goal is to give applicants a good sense of how a company operates on a day-to-day basis, from the perspective of those on the inside. So far, TokyoDev has interviewed developers from Mercari, PayPay, Givery, HENNGE, KOMOJU, and more. In addition, TokyoDev’s job board is a selective one, listing only companies that we feel good about sending applicants to. In the rare event that employees later reach out with poor reviews of a business, if those reports can be confirmed, then TokyoDev will end its relationship with that company. Conclusion In short, the answer to the question “Is there a Japanese equivalent to Glassdoor?” is, “Not really.” However, by combining some of the alternatives—OpenWork, LinkedIn, TokyoDev, and perhaps even Google Maps—you can gather enough information to decide whether you want to work with a particular Japanese company. You could also ask fellow developers in our Discord. Curious about working in Japan in general? See our articles on the subject, as well as moving to Japan, living in Japan, starting a business in Japan, and more.

I’ve spent so much time, had so many headaches, and encountered so much complexity from what, in my estimation, boils down to this: trying to get something to work on multiple computers. It might be time to just go back to having one computer — a personal laptop — do everything. No more commit, push, and let the cloud build and deploy. No more making it possible to do a task on my phone and tablet too. No more striving to make it possible to do anything from anywhere. Instead, I should accept the constraint of doing specific kinds of tasks when I’m at my laptop. No laptop? Don’t do it. Save it for later. Is it really that important? I think I’d save myself a lot of time and headache with that constraint. No more continuous over-investment of my time in making it possible to do some particular task across multiple computers. It’s a subtle, but fundamental, shift in thinking about my approach to computing tasks. Today, my default posture is to defer control of tasks to cloud computing platforms. Let them do the work, and I can access and monitor that work from any device. Like, for example, publishing a version of my website: git commit, push, and let the cloud build and deploy it. But beware, there be possible dragons! The build fails. It’s not clear why, but it “works on my machine”. Something is different between my computer and the computer in the cloud. Now I’m troubleshooting an issue unrelated to my website itself. I’m troubleshooting an issue with the build and deployment of my website across multiple computers. It’s easy to say: build works on my machine, deploy it! It’s deceivingly time-consuming to take that one more step and say: let another computer build it and deploy it. So rather than taking the default posture of “cloud-first”, i.e. push to the cloud and let it handle everything, I’d rather take a “local-first” approach where I choose one primary device to do tasks on, and ensure I can do them from there. Everything else beyond that, i.e. getting it to work on multiple computers, is a “progressive enhancement” in my workflow. I can invest the time, if I want to, but I don’t have to. This stands in contrast to where I am today which is if a build fails in the cloud, I have to invest the time because that’s how I’ve setup my workflow. I can only deploy via the cloud. So I have to figure out how to get the cloud’s computer to build my site, even when my laptop is doing it just fine. It’s hard to make things work identically across multiple computers. I get it, that’s a program not software. And that’s the work. But sometimes a program is just fine. Wisdom is knowing the difference. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

For the past week, I've been working off the Minisforum UM870. A tiny mini PC with an 8-core/16-thread AMD 8745H CPU, which retails for $343 (or €379) as a bare-bone unit, and stays below $550, even after adding 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. I'm shocked to report that I really don't need more than this! I mean, I knew that Apple's Mac Mini, which is equally petite to the Minisforum, had plenty of power for macOS. But somehow I thought Apple had some special sauce that made this possible, and that PCs were forever condemned to be bigger, louder, and slower. How 2020 of me. The UM870 is a little beast. It runs our full HEY test suite in just 2m28s. In comparison, it takes a 14-core M4 Pro 2m49s, and such an Apple costs $2,199, once you've given it 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Now, that M4 Mac Mini can probably do things with, say, 8K video editing that the UM870 can't touch. But on the other hand, the UM870 can play the latest video games. Everything from Fortnite to Cyberpunk 2077 to Forza Horizon. It won't trouble a modern, dedicated Nvidia card for max FPS, but it's perfectly playable at 1080p at medium settings in a ton of games. In raw CPU power, the AMD 8745H will match a regular M4 in multi-core. They both clock in right around 13,000 points on Geekbench 6. Though the M4 is a fair bit quicker in single-core. The AMD is also far behind an M4 Pro in raw multi-core power (13K vs 22K), but at less than a quarter the cost, it's hard to complain. But as with the example of video games, it's often deceiving just to compare the Geekbench numbers, because it all depends on what you're doing. If you're really into video games, it's no use to have extra grunt, if your favorite games won't run. The same is true if you're a developer working with Docker containers and a Linux toolchain. As quoted above, the UM870 handily defeats the M4 Pro in our all-cores-buzzing HEY test suite. That's partly because we run databases and accessories, like MySQL, Redis, and ElasticSearch, in Docker containers. Even though we run the Ruby code natively on both platforms, the Docker dependencies put the Mac further behind than it otherwise would have been, because Linux runs Docker natively, and the Mac has to deal with the file-system tax and other drawbacks. The irony is that it was partly Apple's volume with and investment in TSMC that got us these incredible AMD chips, as they're riding the same improvements in TSMC manufacturing prowess as Apple's M chips. The Zen 4 cores in the 8745H are all forged on the same 5nm process as the M2, so it's no surprise that the AMD cores are dead-on-the-money for Apple's in Geekbench single-core performance. And Zen 4 is even the last generation! The insane new (and insanely named) AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ chip that's used in the upcoming Framework Desktop runs on Zen 5 cores. And with 16 of those, the 395+ is faster in Geekbench multi-core than an M4 Pro, and only ever so slightly behind the M4 Max. On my HEY test suite, it completes the run in an insane 1m21s — more than twice as fast as the 14-core M4 Pro! But I digress. The 395+ chip isn't cheap, even if it's still a great deal. The Framework Desktop with 64GB/1TB, which is twice as fast as the M4 Pro with our HEY tests, is $1,744. That's still less than the $2,199 Mac Mini, which only has 48GB of RAM. But obviously way more than a $550 Minisforum! And while it's quite small, it's not tiny, like the UM870. Regardless, this is what I love about technology. I love when our assumptions are tested: just how small and cheap can an awesome developer machine become? I love that open-source Linux is able to run laps around Apple in the workloads that many developers need (like working with Docker containers). I love that this tiny little silent $550 mini PC on my desk is capable of putting out computing power that only a decade ago would have been reserved to loud, honking metal in a data center. Mini PCs have gotten really good. AMD is on a roll. Linux is a blast. These are my conclusions. Check out the Minisforum UM870 or the Beelink SER8. Anything with an AMD 7745H and up to an 8945HS should be a great deal. If you want to splurge (yet still get a bargain compared to the macs), you could have a look at the new HX370 in the Beelink SER9 or Minisforum X1, but I'd save my money, buy a Lofree Flow84 keyboard to go with the new mini rig, and put the rest of the money towards a KEF LSX II savings fund!