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Well that was a pretty short article!
Nikkei has been doing this a lot lately, essentially tweet-level articles (and tweet-level effort) for full ad revenue.
Everything past the first paragraph gets loaded separately, I'm guessing it didn't for you for some reason.
Interesting, worked in private mode for me. uBlock Origin or PrivacyBadger must have been preventing it loading for me.
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I thought the same thing, it's a single tweet taking up a whole webpage.

Guess it's not loading for me either.

Make them remote, and I'm instantly interested
Let's be real, for $8.8m all of us would move anywhere in the world. Somalia? North Korea? No prob.
Nope. $8.8m does me no good if I get killed in a robbery, killed in some civil war, or die from the lack of proper healthcare.

Money can alleviate those risks but not fix them fully.

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You can buy a lot of security for half that.
NK would be bad because of government repression, but Somalia might be doable.

- parts of the country are defacto independent of the state

- can hire a private army for security

- short hop on a private DC-8 to world class health care in the gulf

Speak for yourself. I would not move to North Korea no matter how much I was paid, ever.
While tempting, I would think hard and loong. I've moved countries three times already, and it's getting harder and harder to do.
I wouldn't even go into the office for 8.8 million.
Look like not paying for labor that makes your clothes, gives you impressive margins. [1]

https://cleanclothes.org/news/2020/the-devastation-of-covid-...

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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...

edited, 'wrong link' sry

  > 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.

This is enrichment :)

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.
I assume that they'll pay one senior person this and otherwise it's just marketing.
You’d have to think that salary conversations inside the company at the mid-career level will be interesting too.

“So… I’m making $200k a year and you said…”

How does it make sense to pay mid level uniqlo employees more than the CEOs of most large banks? what am i missing?
The operator of the Uniqlo chain of casual apparel stores will pay midcareer hires up to 1 billion yen ($8.8 million) a year

I don't see any possibility that this is accurate as reported.

My guess would be that "up to" is carrying all of the weight of that sentence.
$100K salary and 880000% bonus potential
You could work for 6 months and then retire for the rest of your life.

Extremely low and high wages drive people away, but for different reasons.

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.

down votes? Sir, you're in a hacker news forum.
For the vast majority of humans, these salaries are simply not obtainable, at all. These kind of reports are great for one thing- wishful thinking.

To assume that everyone is making or will make the top 0.1% of the top 1% in salaried income is completely absurd.

Maybe the one off rockstar engineer is making this, but for the average techbro this is not going to happen.

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.
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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.
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.
It's moreso just a logical conclusion.

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.
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.

The CEO isn't getting paid this amount.

Edit: Misread the article.
It's literally the first sentence in the article:

> TOKYO -- The operator of the Uniqlo chain of casual apparel stores will pay midcareer hires up to 1 billion yen ($8.8 million)

Right, and that figure does not mesh with any other given in the article
Bad translation, it was 8.8 million yen which is double the typical salary in Japan for this job. It’s a pittance for any US based developer.
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.

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What qualifies as senior these days? I presume it mostly means they know how to handle a large distributed web app. It’s not really for all CS people
> "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.
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.”
Seems like a stunt as usual.

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.

L6 at google is not making 1M/year. Just see levels.fyi. Most l7 a arent either.
> 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.

> "In the future, our rival will be GAFA [Google, Apple, Facebook (now Meta) and Amazon] rather than Zara," Yanai said.

Those are some big words.

So the new acronym can be MAGA?
MANGA
A new acronym is a good opportunity to drop Netflix from that group.
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).
I hope not, MAGA is kind of overloaded at this point. If you add Microsoft, you can have:

MAMAA (Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon)

or

GAMMA (using G for Google but not F for Facebook seems incosistent but it's a better acronym overall)

Given how bad for the planet are, I would be more keen to use MAGMA
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
Grouping companies based on how well they fit into a pronounceable acronym, at this point, seems a little silly.
No need for an acronym: simply call them the monopolists.
But tell me this doesn't get you hyped af!
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?
Just because it’s not tech doesn’t mean it’s not hard.

Are you concerned Nike might steal Apple’s computer design know-how?

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.

Looking forward to the Uniqlo "Dark Patterns" collection made with "Cloud-based" fabrics, coming this fall. Oh, and NFTs! Mustn't forget the NFTs.
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".
Picking up major WeWork vibes from this.
For reference Roger Federer gets $30 million a year for representing Uniqlo.
Those numbers seem too absurd to be true….

Did they pay one guy or something and now we have an article?

There no way this is real, this definitely couldn't be economically viable
What I'm more curious about is what are they looking to build?
Can someone explain why Uniqlo's future rivals will be the likes of Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon rather than Zara?
No. Marketing fluff cannot be explained.
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.
Tech valuations outstrip clothing valuations so they need to pose as a tech company.
I would guess that it is because of Shein[1].

>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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein_(company)

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.

I just don’t understand why a clothing company needs so many engineers. It’s not as if we know anything about fashion.
An ecommerce company might, or any large company in general can likely use more than a few.
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.
It is pretty clear from the last 6 months that supply chain disruptions are likely to blame…not production.
>"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.

*up to

So they’re probably looking for one CTO with $8.8m comp, and a ton of engineers for $100-200k.

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.