I appreciate the transparency effort of giving average monthly overtime at your company in a Job Description for recruitment.
But how can you write down “40 to 70 hours” and not think “we have a problem” ?
I appreciate the transparency effort of giving average monthly overtime at your company in a Job Description for recruitment.
But how can you write down “40 to 70 hours” and not think “we have a problem” ?
I have a private mailing-list with my closest childhood friends which we use to keep in touch now that we’re spread all around the world. One of them, who recently finished an MBA at Waseda and has yet to jump into the business world, started a thread asking all of us to describe our jobs objectively and in simple terms, not using all the cryptic buzzwords that we might use in our LinkedIn profiles.
I found the exercise very interesting which is why I will copy my reply in here. Be prepared, it’s a bit lengthy.
I work for Valeo in the Compressor Branch. We make compressors for automobile air conditioning systems: for those who remember their physics lessons and the first law of thermodynamics, the decompression of a fluid lowers its temperature. This is why A/C systems use what we call an A/C loop where we compress/condense a gas on one side before decompressing/evaporating it in a heat exchanger to cool the air coming in your car (then that gas goes back into the compressor for another round in the closed loop). The technology is rather cool and I love looking at CAD models, manipulating the prototypes and talking with our designers to understand how every little part of our product works.
Back to me. So Valeo is this big automotive parts company which is organized into branches by product family: Compressors, Transmissions, Wipers (don’t under-estimate, windshield wipers are high technology items), Lighting Systems, etc. Under each branch there is a division for each country of production. I work for the Compressor branch and therefore give services to all the divisions of my branch in multiple countries: Japan, Thailand, South Korea, China, Czech Republic and USA.
The Compressor branch is a bit special by the fact that it is the only one whose HQ is not around Paris but in Tokyo. The activity was bought back from a Japanese company as a joint-venture with Bosch, then 100% by Valeo 4 years ago. It is therefore a Japanese company whose whole top management (except for R&D) was replaced by French expatriates after acquisition…
I work in a team that manages the information systems (computers and software) of the whole R&D service: 80% in Japan, 20% and growing in the other divisions I listed above. I work mainly on the the PLM system (Product Lifecycle Management) – a kind of big software system that handles all the product design activity from start to finish:
I’m the main-guy on this rather big-big-system. I’m the expert. I train the users, I solve their problems be it technical (buggy server) or functional (software not used in the right way), but mainly I observe all the processes linked to the system – spanning all domains of the company except finance/accounting) – and try to modify the software (by writing specifications that will be written in code by offshore developer in India) or the way that we use it to improve the efficiency of these processes. See Kaizen.
What I like in my job:
What I don’t like in my job:
It’s christmas day and I’m at the office, working…
Actually, it’s nothing unusual for Japan where the 25th is a day like any other day. But this year is special: you should know that I work for a big French automotive parts manufacturer, and this is not a very fun time for us.
Car production is down ~30% over all the industry, which means we also must cut our production by 30%. So our manufacturing plants all over the world are shutting down 1 or 2 weeks early for new year vacations.
But then, since part of my job is support, not only for Japan but for all our plants around the world, I have to be there in an empty office in an empty factory on Christmas day in case the phone rings or an email comes in requiring my mad skills…
*crickets chirping*… yeah, right…
Just a random conversation during one of my team’s daily meetings at work:
Colleague: We have a problem with the *censored* server.
Boss: Where is that server located?
Colleague: It’s in the Intellectual Property room, on the 2nd floor of the Reliability building.
Me: Yeah, you know that place? It’s right next to the office of Lost Causes.
We always have lots of fun during our daily meetings.
This morning, after almost 2 weeks of negociations between HR, my boss and I, I signed my employment contract at Valeo Thermal Systems Japan.
I’m hired for 3 years in a position slightly higher than I had before. I’m staying on the same project and on the same team but I’ll drop all the basely technical stuff and focus entirely on functional definitions and architecture of the application we manage.
It’s a big relief for me as I will not have that pending visa expiration constantly nagging me and I can start thinking of my longterm life here in Japan.
It also means I’m gonna start paying taxes… It sucks… I guess the universe has to balance itself, to each action a reaction.