First of all, the Japanese semiconductor situation is worst as far as I feel and it would be worse in the future. Japanese big electronic companies used to lead this industry to make many reliable, useful, and cost effective products and sell them in the world, and those companies definitely are companies which made "made-in-Japan" one phrase meaning great quality of products. As many people know, it is the old story of good times. Now such companies are not doing good totally. There are however many departments even in such companies which are making money well, but there are more departments which are losing money, so totally companies' profit is in the red. Managing people in such companies originally used to be good engineers and are not used to run companies and make decisions of a business properly, so they are not able to cut non-profitable departments by hoping something miracle and keep them until it's too late. Such companies are almost going bankrupt and are now struggling to cut such groups, cut people, and reorganize companies, otherwise they will be gone, which cause temporal collapse of Japanese economics. It is easier to attribute this to external factors, but internal factors are also cause of this. I do not mean to analyze the reason why this has happened and how Japanese electronic companies lose their competitiveness here, but I would like to mention what I felt these days about job hunting of the semiconductor industry in Japan as far as I can know.
Two months ago, I had opportunities to be an interviewer of a young engineer position because a group which I'm in now had to employ one engineer to compensate one engineer who left the company. When I got a list of candidates from HR, I was surprised and shocked to know current job hunting situation. Our company is small and unknown, but almost all peoples in the list are working or worked at well known big companies and their age is around 40s and 50s. (It's common to show age in Japan job hunting market, although it's uncommon outside Japan.) I thought that they would not apply for the job in this small company. I, of course, asked HR if there were young engineer candidates because they would be overqualified and we looked for young one, but it looked like that there were not actually according to HR. Our group did interviews for a few persons and I attended as an interviewer of technical discussion. However what I felt was that interviewed people looked having huge pride of working at big companies and they did not look like desperate for job hunting. I guess that they would be just asked an early retirement which is soft layoff with benefit, and jobs hunting itself coming from negative motivation, so they did that reluctantly. One guy said proudly that he has been involved in XX module products last ten years, but he did not know inside the module when I asked how it consists of inside and draw brief figures like how signal is processed. I was wondering what he has been doing so far, and what people have been doing in big companies. What I heard is that each person's job is so focused on one thing that people don't know whole view and how what they do contributes to final products.
Two weeks ago I met one of my friends whose works for a recruitment agency, and asked him what's going on the semiconductor industry market. He did not specify names, but foreign companies in Japan have already closed their design department in Japan and kept only support and sale departments. His jobs is busy by nature regardless of business condition. What he said was that situation in the semiconductor is negative right now because people look for jobs with negative reason like I mentioned above. People with negative reason is definitely more than people with positive reason like career up. He said that his job is great because he is able to support people get jobs regardless of reasons, but today's market is too tough for engineers who have not improve own value and done what they are asked to do and stick to companies which they thought are too big to fail.
This situation is so sad, but only feeling sad makes nothing at all. Positively I try to think that I'm lucky to know this serious situation at a relatively young age before the age when it becomes too late. The most important thing which I can do is to have crisis awareness and to improve my value in the market anytime.
The picture is from
http://higheredstrategy.com/recession-not-going-as-planned/
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