Which mid-level engineer in SV makes $9M ? IIRC ~L6/L7 salaries at Google are around ~$1M, and I think they are ~40% lower in Tokyo. I remember seeing a similar news piece for NEC a few years ago - about how the salaries can go as high as $1M.
Meanwhile, even those tech workers who do chose to work there in Tokyo have been stranded out of Japan for ~1.5y now; and unlike the US, which despite falling birth rates and a lack of interest in Tech from the natives, manages to keep its industry afloat with an endless supply of grad-students from India/China, Japan has basically shut itself off to STEM students too.
I'm not sure if they have their priorities straight for a tech ecosystem. Which is surprising (and a bit tragic), considering that Tokyo was neck-and-neck with SV until before the internet boom.
> Which mid-level engineer in SV makes $9M ? IIRC ~L6/L7 salaries at Google are around ~$1M, and I think they are ~40% lower in Tokyo. I remember seeing a similar news piece for NEC a few years ago - about how the salaries can go as high as $1M.
Basically no one offers that out of the gate. Even L6 at Google is not going to be anywhere near $1m. L7 isn't either. If you notice - all the L7 samples at Google on levels are people who have significant tenure at the company and thus lots of appreciation.
Only way you're getting $1m+ as a software eng IC at any tech company is by being a celebrity, extremely rare specialist, or - the most common way - through stock appreciation. There are plenty of L5/L6 eng out there making $1m+/yr (I was one) but that's entirely due to stock appreciation and that's it. $9M/yr is definitely an outlier and would only be experienced by early eng at $10B+ valuation company.
I was in a Uniqlo in Manhattan a few months ago and my guess is that they've deployed some kind of computer vision tool for identifying purchases. I went to the checkout kiosk and my purchases were already on screen, no need to scan barcodes, no visible RFID tags. It was incredibly friction free and if it got deployed universally at all major retailers would eliminate hundreds of thousands, if not millions of retail jobs.
Yes, you are. Most of the tags (the cheap ones) wear out after a few washes, but some do not (the expensive ones). And the expensive ones will eventually become cheap. I worked on commercial tech a while back that can scan these tags. And I built a smart home dashboard that does this to track wallets, phones, car keys, my cats and my dog within my home. Tags embedded in pet collars and wallet linings.
I also wrote a prescient short story, titled "Smart Furniture", published 20+ years ago, where the protagonist's day job was driving past people's houses to scan the tags on the interior, and he considered himself "better" than those folks who stood around in malls scanning the clothing of people as they pass by and accosting them with special offers. The ultimate form of "browser fingerprinting" in a way.
You joke but there’s been militaries debating forcing all brought in items be microwaved to avoid hidden electronics being inadvertently sent to a secret military location.
You can already do that with google ads. Your google apps and devices report your location. You can join various datasets on who purchased what and when.
Google themselves has ad offerings making this fairly easy.
I shopped at a Uniqlo in Brooklyn and their checkout automation is very good. If you look carefully at the clothing tags, they have some RFID circuits in there. The result is you drop your clothing in a big self-checkout bin and it just rings up everything for you perfectly.
RFID tags are very tiny, at Target we got them in stuff like the tags on dish towels. Not the paper tag held on by a plastic string but like the wash/materials tags.
But for clothes it has to be on removed tag, otherwise whenever they wear those clothes to store, it will try to charge them again. Unless it's individually serialized and they have a large database, which is scary from a tracking perspective...
> Unless it's individually serialized and they have a large database
They already have that large database, those purchases are all already tracked and associated with a customer (to the extent they can depending on context). If you buy something at a major retailer, you'll get a receipt with a transaction number on it, with all the items of course on the receipt; the retailers are usually permanently warehousing that data. The data is text and trivial and gets easier to store closer to active space every day that passes (as opposed to only keeping the huge piles of data on ice; you want it rapidly accessible if you need to always be able to check for any transaction in the past, eg in that scenario of past items coming into the store from who knows when).
I hope those tags are microwave safe. People warm towels by wetting them and microwaving them and plates by placing towels between the plates in a stack.
As many replies have stated, retail theft is already trivial RFID or not.
When I was in university, a roommate made it a habit of ringing out several pounds of alcohol as celery in self checkout on a monthly basis. They got caught after years of this behavior. Probably thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands in theft. Their only punishment was a slap on the wrist (don't come back to this specific store).
Why not? People are walking into stores with bags, throwing as much as they can in and then walking out just fine. All in broad daylight. What is amazon doing that will prevent that?
The current traditional way of shoplifting is to just walk out the front door. Employees are (properly) instructed to never attempt to stop the criminal, and unless the criminal steals thousands of dollars of merchandise the retailer most likely won't bother to call the police unless the person is doing it multiple times at the same store.
It's a national epidemic in the US and is presently thrashing just about every major retailer. Huge store changes are coming because of that this decade and it'll be ugly.
Amazon can photograph/record the criminals all they want, stores already do that. If they try to stop the criminals from leaving, they're setting up a hyper dangerous violent confrontation scenario with the criminal and the customers still in the store (you do not want that under any circumstances, you want to just let the criminal go). Amazon will do the obvious thing and not stop the criminal after a few customers get murdered in the store from a thief that flips out after getting 'caged,' if they're dumb enough to try to stop them (and or Amazon gets a few customer hostage scenarios). Nobody in power in US urban areas gives a shit about any of this any longer, the US is collapsing in the style of a Latin American Socialist paradise (see: Los Angeles rail thefts). No laws, increasing corruption, and it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. Strip mine the US for the $$$ and get the hell out, that's all it's good for now, and the clock is ticking on that (inevitable far higher taxes in exchange for nothing better (the higher taxes are just to pay for past spending mistakes, debt, at this point) + value debasement from USD Fed damage will considerably erode that equation's effectiveness over the next ~20 years).
Exactly, Amazon’s tech is aptly named “Just walk out shopping” [0]
I don’t think people will engage in shoplifting in these types of stores, since you give a lot of personal information through your Amazon account, which would facilitate prosecution.
[0] http://justwalkout.com/
> I think it is 8.8 million yen for non-tech salaries.
This is much more believable for Japan, where salaries in larger organizations tend to be very structured, and typically not on the high side.
Most cushy jobs offer QoL benefits via non-salary perquisites of some sort or another, and these can be substantial.
Edit: Another possibility is that the $8.8m is the total amount that will be spent on mid-career hires. That would be about right if they bring on 100 people at ~$88k each, and the article mentions bringing on 100 or “even 200” new mid-career hires.
I feel like this is common among non-tech companies. I went to college near a large grocery chain, a trucking company, and a meat processor. All three of them had the same tagline of "we're like a tech company that sells X".
Apple has already begun. Apple + Nike targeting sportswear. Apple + Hermès targeting upper class consumers. How long until they acquire all the know-how they need and ditch their strategic partners?
I don’t really know anything about fashion, but I find it hard to believe that anyone would take Apple seriously as a high-end fashion brand. To me they seem like Target: undoubtedly more fancy than Walmart, but it’s not like that’s a high bar.
And sure, maybe the fashion eites of the world all use Apple products, but that’s more a consequence of the duopolies and a lack of choice for consumers rather than any actual merit of the brand itself.
Google is still the name of LLC most people are referring to. Rest of the Alphabet aren't the target. Facebook the company no longer exist. So I'll vote for MAGMA
MAMAA (Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon) looks like the winner at the moment. Big Tech doesn't seem to like most of the alphabet (even though one of them is literally called that).
Seriously, fuck fast fashion and the like. It’s insane how so much of modern consumerism is propped up by what is either literally or almost literally slavery.
That might explain why one of the shirts from my last order wasn't even stitched up properly on the left seam.
Although I must say the quality of their products had been on a sharp decline since even before the pandemic. The fit remained scary consistent though.
For me by the way that sounds like a good reason to 'buy local'
for an example, hint: the gag for me (maybe unseen on the photos of their 'Strickwaren' made in Frankfurt) was Criss Cross wearing they clothes 'wrong side' an they (the label VM) thought and presented 30y ago , that 'it is posible, we can do this' ...local, page: //www.velvetmonkeesshop.com/VM-STRICK-PULLOVER-p123861920 , also nice that they wrote 'Felix is 188cm and wears size...' (-:
and um no i am not involved or getting tantieme by that comapany, this anecdotical posting was just for your entertaiment, regards...
> For me by the way that sounds like a good reason to 'buy local'
You're right, the perfect reason even. Thanks for making me see.
I was under the illusion that locally made business-casual style clothing would be difficult to find. A very quick search was all it took to bust that idea, and make me feel ridiculous for thinking it in the first place.
More expensive, naturally, but the price difference is minimal - not much more than a small uptick.
Meanwhile half the items on their website are out of stock right now - maybe they ought to spend the money on production instead? That’s the only way they’re going to get my money.
For those saying it’s a typo, it’s not, if you read further:
“More than [CEO] Yanai's own pay of 400 million yen, the maximum amount will be among the highest in the nation.”
> "We are looking for people who can create new value and think about businesses from scratch, not consultants and those who worked at big corporations," Yanai said.
To me this shows Yanai's head is in the right place, but the question of how you achieve this in a big company. Offering big salaries is of little use if you can't create an environment conducive to iterating fast on big ideas. Essentially you need startup people, but in general startup people will be eaten alive by big company politics. Even in SV where you have more crossover it's still a rare breed that can do both. I have no idea if Uniqlo fits the stereotypical Japanese corporate culture, but if the senior ranks are full of lifers with a conservative bent then Yanai has his work cut out for him.
It's clearly the Uber/WeWork playbook: masquerade as a tech company, even if you're not, because then you can lose money all the time without investors stopping their injections of fresh cash.
>The company was not involved in clothing design and manufacturing, and instead obtained its products from the wholesale clothing market in Guangzhou. In 2014, Shein acquired Romwe, another Chinese e-commerce retailer, making it a "fully integrated retailer." In 2020, Shein was the most talked about brand on TikTok and Youtube and the 4th most talked about brand on Instagram.
Shein seems to be a frontend to the Chinese clothing industry. They are faster and cheaper than traditional retailers, which should include Uniqlo. If Uniqlo wants or has to compete, they have to build a similar platform in a fraction of the time.
Maybe they also want to expand into virtual reality and such, then they have to become a software company. After all, they sell fashion and not textiles. If people spend their money on hats and armor in games, then they have to be there, and not in a shopping mall.
>"We are looking for people who can create new value and think about businesses from scratch, not consultants and those who worked at big corporations," Yanai said. "Geniuses who are more capable than me. If the pool is bountiful, we'll take 100 or even 200."
I think it's the "mid-career" that's misleading here. They're really looking for the top, actual world-class talent with those potential salaries. In which case they aren't so insane.
I feel like the term “mid-career” is a bit misleading here since the CEO says up to 100-200 hires, which depending on the size of their engineering team might be ~1% of the engineering team.
Eg they want very senior talent and are willing to outbid Amazon, etc.
Or one CTO for a lot less than that and a bunch of engineers for...also a _lot_ less than that. "Up to" makes the sentence meaningless, this is just for marketing.
If I'm reading this right, it's not actually saying anything about tech hires. Given the outrageous compensation, this is probably for management roles?
> "We are looking for people who can create new value and think about businesses from scratch, not consultants and those who worked at big corporations," Yanai said. "Geniuses who are more capable than me. If the pool is bountiful, we'll take 100 or even 200."
Is it just me or is the quote imply they want a startup founder inside Uniqlo? Why not just make a separate business? Or at least a new business unit at first.
Are you sure? The article explicitly says the opposite.
Not clear how that could be a bad translation, at least it seems unlikely since then it raises the question of why the currency conversion came out to a nice round number.
I think the headline is misleading. If you read the article, it sounds like they've increased the salary cap. It seems like a leap to assume they're offering anyone salaries at that cap.
I hope to one day fall so far upward that I end up in a multimillion dollar a year role that I can flail through for a year (maybe two) then call it a day.
Yea, CEO's and their golden parachutes. They make 8000% of the median worker income, and whether the company succeeds or fails they rake in millions.
When the company is successful all credit goes to the CEO, and when they fail blame goes to everyone else as the CEO takes time to be with family with their golden parachute worth millions.
The era of the cult of CEO needs to end, it's become grotesque.
You're shadow boxing an opponent that doesn't exist.
Ilya Suskever is not a "mid-level" (as per the article) employee, he is a C-suite level employee at a tech venture.
Implying that uniqlo is using "$8.8m salaries to draw talent" implies that those salaries are broadly available to "mid-level" employees.
This is extremely implausible to me, given that that level of compensation (4x more than the C-suite employee you identified) is on par or larger than CEOs of some of the largest banks in the world.
It's possible that a company could pay this much. But likely they could pay half this amount and still get same talent.
In a free market with logical players, makes 0 sense to pay 3-4x the highest competitor in wages, when you could pay 25-50% more and get the same talent.
Of course that's just the theory. Companies can pay whatever they want in reality.
Raising the ceiling on compensation for exceptional talent seems like good business strategy to me. This is a great time to understand technology as we become a science-hating culture completely addicted to science and technology to survive. Milk it for all it's worth no matter what your skill level. If your boss can afford to buy bottled farts from reality stars and Bored Ape NFTs they can afford to pay you more.
Ilya Suskever is not just an employee, they're C-suite and notable enough to have a Wikipedia page. Obviously people earn millions per year, but they're generally pretty notable and rare.
Salaries like these are a stunt in the _vast_ majority of cases. There's so few people that could ever be worth that kind of money that it's pretty clearly just the PR department throwing this at the wall for news. Blatant attention grabs don't often get praise from engineers.
In tech, engineers that aren't paying at least some attention to the compensation of their peers will not fare well IMO. No one wants you to undervalue yourself more than the org underpaying you to undervalue yourself. I'm for open compensation personally, but since we can't have that lest there be madness or something, make sure your grass is sufficiently watered to remain green.
Which mid-level engineer in SV makes $9M ? IIRC ~L6/L7 salaries at Google are around ~$1M, and I think they are ~40% lower in Tokyo. I remember seeing a similar news piece for NEC a few years ago - about how the salaries can go as high as $1M.
Meanwhile, even those tech workers who do chose to work there in Tokyo have been stranded out of Japan for ~1.5y now; and unlike the US, which despite falling birth rates and a lack of interest in Tech from the natives, manages to keep its industry afloat with an endless supply of grad-students from India/China, Japan has basically shut itself off to STEM students too.
I'm not sure if they have their priorities straight for a tech ecosystem. Which is surprising (and a bit tragic), considering that Tokyo was neck-and-neck with SV until before the internet boom.