No work/life balance: not sure why other people say it has a good work life balance. My experience is that they expect you to do on-call once a month, do patching and application releases overnight or on weekends (often with only minimal notice) as well as be able to answer the phone when not on-call, just in case. All the while, expecting you to study for exams to get certifications which you will never use because they are so far behind.
Low pay: Most of the base pay is below industry standards, most pay rises were about 1% per year, the last 2 years there were no pay rises, and Management justified it because they lost too many contracts. So the workers end up suffering because the management can't keep the current clients..
Annual Leave: In the past few years, because they are losing money, they started to force people to take annual leave, First it was you have to take 20 days per financial year, then it was that you can't have a balance over 8 at the end of the financial year, the next year, it was down to a balance of 7.
This cause you to take annual leave mostly in the final month of the financial year (March cause it is a Japanese company) which is also quiet a busy time, which means staff are missing at important time.
Redundancies: Over the past 4 years, they have been making staff redundancy at regular intervals. Firstly it was one a year (usually around June/July) but since then, they have been making people redundancy in small lots (1-2 a week) this mean moral is rock bottom, and most staff don't know what is happening when they come to work on a Monday.
