It's Been Awhile

It has been way too long since I actually posted something (I looked at my history and apparently a comment I made to talk-a-tone, http://www.talkatone.com/, which, I have actually changed my mind about now and I'm on their beta release of 0.9.7 which integrates SMS capabilities; only thing that's left is giving me voicemail, but with their blazing fast release deployment, it shouldn't be much longer).  I actually convinced myself that I'm too busy to write a blog.  I always find it kind of funny what we convince ourselves that we cannot do.  Sometimes, I think that the person we lie to the most is ourselves.  Anyways, I figure I will start to try to jot down my thoughts more often.

I am currently being employed by a medium-sized (~750 employees) company that has international offices.  The headquarters is in southern New Jersey right outside of Philadelphia, but we have manufacturing facilities in Singapore and northern Japan.  My apartment is 226km and my factory is 215km from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as the crow flies.  Granted, there is a 1,500m mountain range completely separating us and the prevailing winds blow 180 degrees in the opposite directions, but this is still pretty close to the potentially second worse nuclear disaster in the world.  One of the reasons I took this job initially was because of the overseas travel opportunities.  When I finally graduated, I had my Master's degree in an engineering field and 1 year of cutting edge lab work with all my internships, but I took an average $15,000 pay cut compared to my peers by working for this smaller company.

All this background leads to a running conversation I've been having with my boss.  A couple days after the quake, tsunami, and nuclear incident occurred, my American boss told me that, if I needed, the company would arrange for immediate evacuation.  Since, my area was (and currently is) unaffected, I said that I did not need this at the time.  A couple days later, the owner of the company sent out an email to myself and one other America in Japan stating his appreciation that we are staying in Japan to "keep the calm" with our local employees, implying that leaving Japan would be detrimental to both the company and our careers.  This still didn't phase me because I feel no sense of danger.  I then went on a one week vacation to Thailand for a friend's wedding and, while I was gone, it became abundantly clear that the production control group I'm working with was on auto-pilot while I was away and was on the verge of not functioning if I was gone any longer.  Although I'm constantly working on training and implementing new software to make production control more independent, if I leave the country, they will resort to using post-it notes and a clipboard to schedule and run a 150,000 unit production facility (yes, by PAPER, this is the reason why I was brought over to Japan, to fix this).  Finally, with a 7.1 earthquake that occurred 28 days after the March 11 earthquake, I decided that with everything that has been going on, the urgency of fixing the factory, my critical nature in the company, and the added stress of constantly going through the unknown, if my American boss and I could talk about compensation (this is the first time I've ever brought up a raise in my 2 years of working at this company which already undervalued me at $15,000).

The short answer.  ABSOLUTELY NOT.  "I gave you the opportunity to come home when all this occurred," said my American boss and "We're not in the business of giving out combat pay."  There are several factors as to how a company treats an employee.  Companies are in business to make a profit and employees are the biggest cost to a company, so naturally, regardless of how benevolent a company is, they want to pay their employees as little as possible.  Although, for the most part, my company is just OK to work for, there are some irreconcilable differences that a company can perform, such as telling an employee "you're so worthless that we're not even going to talk about a raise even though you relocated 10,000 miles, are putting in 60+ hour weeks, and with constant stress of impending catastrophe only 230km away".  I'm not sure when I'm coming home from Asia (my contract says April 2012, but I'm I know I'm going to stay longer, just not sure how much longer), but I'll definitely be finding a new company when I get back.  There are some bridges, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.