| I don't know where you got the idea I thought Japan was a workplace utopia. Yea I know it sucks. My point was the social cohesion has it's pluses. I didn't name any of them so I guess that makes my point poorly made. Maybe this will make it clearer? Let's say you do a contract for $1000. As the contract progresses they promote you to fellow business people. "This guy's great. You should contract him for your needs". At the end of the contract you get paid the $1000. You're then asked, "hey, could you print 1 extra copy of that report" Possible responses 1. Sure, That will be $50 2. Sure, on problem. Here you go. Probably a bad example but I'd argue that (1) is the "me" attitude and (2) is the "us" attitude. They gave you free PR. I guess they should have been "Oh, you want me to tell me business contacts about you? Give me 10% for each successful contract". I want to live in world (1) where people help each other unless it's total unreasonable.. Staying extra months at the company could arguably be unreasonable but it's also possible to feel obligation. You don't know how much training that employee received or what else they got from the relationship. As another example, some company could hire you with zero experience (taking a chance). You'd applied to 25 places but everyone said "no experience no hire". You work at this company and mostly they get very little good work out of you because they're giving you so much training. Not only are you slower than the experienced people but those experienced people have to spend time explaining better ways to do things to you, time they could be spending directly on their other responsibilities. At the end of year you now have "experience" so you ditch the company for another job. Some people would see that as close to theft. You just took a free paid education from them when they were hoping the deal was they'd train you, even paying you while you're being trained vs you having to pay a school to train you, and then they expected you to be a productive employee for at least a year or two after the training. Would you seriously feel zero obligation? |