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The story
A Yahoo! News report on the finding that “young people today don’t want to get promoted” sparked debate on 5ch. About 60% of people in their twenties said they want a promotion, while roughly 50% said they don’t want overtime even if it means earning more — and the thread buzzed with theories trying to reconcile that apparent contradiction. Posters pointed out that becoming a manager can mean a higher base salary but no more overtime pay, so take-home pay can actually drop; others questioned the labor-law provision that exempts “managers and supervisors” from overtime pay altogether; still others raised the twisted incentive where the most capable employees get stuck at the office even after finishing their work early, while slower coworkers who take longer effectively come out ahead. The whole thread turned into a cost-benefit argument over whether promotion is even worth it.
“It’s not just that I find the work fulfilling — my aptitude actually seems to suit this job, so I’d like to move up past my peers and seniors into some kind of leadership position.”
So says a man in his twenties who works at a toy manufacturer in Tokyo.
“Young people today don’t want to get promoted” — or so the narrative goes.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Used to happen, yeah.
Going from team leader (主任) to section chief (課長) could mean a pay cut.
Your base salary goes up, but you lose overtime pay, so it takes about three years to break even.
Our industry's pretty cushy by trade standards — even 30 hours of overtime a month was considered a lot —
but these days even regular staff are increasingly on discretionary-labor deals, so it's basically like being salaried/exempt anyway.
That's one thing where the seats are limited — not everyone gets to sit in one.
There are already cases of AI being put in management roles these days, so who knows what it'll look like a decade from now.
Seems like a law that only benefits garbage executives.
The logic is supposedly that managers can decide their own work, so they could easily fake having "worked" — but realistically that level of autonomy only applies to actual executives.
Even if you're not on the board, I get it for department-head (部長) level and above — but section-chief (課長) level feels different.
There's nothing to explain — if you don't actually qualify as a "managerial supervisor" under the law, it just means the company is shady and still illegally withholding overtime pay.
Assuming you're not just talking out of your ass with zero real experience (エアプ, lit. "air-play" — gamer slang for faking it).
A generation ago that would've gotten you called crazy.
Now there are plenty of people saying it dead seriously.
Which version of the world is the right one?
It comes down to competence.
There's the guy who wraps up his work cleanly with no overtime, and the guy who needs hours of overtime just to finish.
Just pay the first guy more.
But Japanese management only pays for hours spent chained to a desk.
Low-birthrate-generation new hire: "My base salary is ¥210,000."
High-birthrate-generation senior training them: "Mine's ¥180,000."
Being born into a big generation just means you lose out.
Exactly.
I'm late-wave Dankai Junior (団塊Jr — children of Japan's baby boomers) and hit the Employment Ice Age (氷河期 — Japan's brutal 1990s–2000s hiring freeze).
Absolutely the worst.
Watching kids today, I'm so jealous (裏山 — 2ch slang, syllables of "羨ましい" flipped) I sob into my pillow every night.
But once you're middle-aged and younger bosses start piling up, quitting ends up being your only option.
From what I actually hear, it's often the younger boss who's uncomfortable and self-conscious about it. They end up with weirdly specific knowledge in random places too.
My own work is done by 2 or 3pm, but then they tell me to go help someone else,
and suddenly I'm stuck there till quitting time exactly, or even dragged into overtime.
Just work from home then.
I had a part-time job once with a "done means done" system — once you finished your own work, you could go home. The slow ones stayed forever, while the capable ones finished in the morning and left.
But under the typical Japanese work style of "everyone helps each other out," the capable ones end up the losers.
It's just not possible in my industry.
We're skilled trade workers, so the real nightmare is dealing with a client-side manager who's terrified of anything going wrong unless someone's physically on-site until 5pm.
There's absolutely nothing to do, and you're stuck on standby from noon to 5pm anyway. Makes me want to strangle someone.
Well, I just stop taking jobs under that manager after that.
Even when every potential problem's already been covered, they still want you there from morning to night, sitting in on the handover too.
Well, I'm getting paid for it so whatever, but at least block out a conference room or break room for us.
Everyone in the trade just works on other job sites while on standby (usually from the car).
Can't quite picture what job that is, but sounds rough.
The whole upside of being a manager is supposedly having the authority to reshape your organization the way you want, though.
I'd be happy to help out — as long as that time gets paid as overtime.
This kind of mindset comes from bad early training, honestly.
The typical salaried employment contract is time-bound — it says so explicitly in the employment contract and work terms.
So deciding for yourself where "your job" ends, based on your own sense of workload, is fundamentally not how it works.
Once your boss gives you an instruction, that instruction is now your job.
Talking about overtime pay on top of that is just losing the plot.
Then I'll just slack off and water my work down to match.
Can you look at a boss who spends his days off at the office and think "I want that"?
Can you look at a boss whose responsibilities ballooned while his pay barely budged and think "I want that"?
Of course people are going to hate it unless promotion actually leads somewhere worth dreaming about.
Small-to-mid-size companies maybe, but at big corporations managers are covered by the "work style reform" (働き方改革 — Japan's government-led overtime/labor reform push) rules too.
I'm not even in management, but junior staff have quit just from seeing my working conditions. In the office every weekend, stuck doing everything myself because nobody else can, can't even take paid leave, and all-nighters aren't rare. Pay's the same or worse than theirs (can't move up because the ranks above are clogged).
Companies need to actually make this a place people want to work, or it's pointless.
The gap in results and skill between people is huge, and complaints from the incompetent just get ignored anyway (since they never quit regardless).
That's just how it is.
I'm a steel-structure construction supervisor, roughly department-head (部長) level at a normal company, but when the client is a time-thief there's nothing you can do about it.
The job's already finished, but then it's "could you also help with this and that while you're at it," or "stay on standby until 5pm," and so on.
Makes you want to kill someone, right?
You just end up like me — able to kill infinite time scrolling around Google Maps.
Like, get real lol.
Yeah, exactly. They're just indulging in their own self-centered fantasy. Their whole life is one big excuse (´・ω・`).
What? The ones being selfish are the executives who want to keep wages as low as possible while still getting people to work.
Getting promoted means moving closer to the management side.
And if you shirk that managerial responsibility, a demotion to some backwater post is waiting for you.
That's just a fantasy too (´・ω・`). "Moving closer to management" doesn't actually mean anything.
In reality, the ranks above on-site managers are totally clogged — there are tons of "eternal site chiefs" and "deputy site chiefs" who never move up.
People quit the moment a relocation order comes down.
That's especially true for people born and raised in Tokyo.
Funny thing is, the grandparents' generation fled the countryside for Tokyo precisely because they hated it there — but now that it's been two straight generations of dual-income households, today's young people get stuck the moment they're separated from their parents, since there's no one left to help with childcare.
Guess they can do whatever they want — big companies have endless replacements lined up anyway.
Just hire locally at each location then — saves you the trouble of layoffs too.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The reason managers generally don’t receive overtime pay is Article 41, Item 2 of Japan’s Labor Standards Act, which exempts “managers and supervisors” from working-hour regulations — a designation meant to come with real authority over hiring/scheduling decisions, discretion over one’s own hours, and compensation to match. Where the thread split was over whether that rule matches reality: some argued it makes sense for department-head (部長) level and above, while others countered that at the section-chief (課長) level, managers typically have neither the discretion nor the pay to justify it, making it effectively illegal unpaid overtime. There was also a broader productivity argument — that the most capable workers lose out by being kept at the office until quitting time even after finishing early — which fed into wider frustration with seniority-based, presence-focused work culture. One point readers often get wrong: not all managers are automatically ineligible for overtime pay. Employers are still legally required to pay overtime to so-called “manager in title only” (名ばかり管理職) employees who don’t actually meet the legal criteria.
※This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Youth] Is It True That “Young People Today Don’t Want to Get Promoted”? About 60% of People in Their 20s Want a Promotion—Yet Roughly 50% Say “Even If I Could Earn More, I Don’t Want to Work Overtime”.”
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