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The story
On 5ch’s “Live Commentary General” board, a thread blew up over reports that major Japanese companies are cutting back on new-graduate hiring. Posters argued that it’s not just new grads — “big companies don’t want mid-career hires or full-time employees anymore either” — and many pointed to AI taking over tasks once handled by junior staff. Others noted the stark contrast with just a few years ago, when reports described an “extreme sellers’ market” with new grads reportedly offered monthly salaries of ¥400,000, and questioned whether companies are simply unwilling to spend on training and are treating workers as disposable. Opinion split on whether AI or corporate culture is the real culprit.
What people said
That's more like it.
Big companies: "Honestly, don't need full-timers either."
This, exactly.
Yeah, that was it.
A skilled person using AI can do the work of about three people now.
Veteran: "Just do this." → AI
Big companies: "Wait… do we even need new hires?"
Since AI can handle almost all desk work now, it's not just new hires — even below-average veterans will become unnecessary.
Well, in the end they're just a stopgap until then.
If the job can be replaced, the smart move is to keep hiring to a minimum and go all-in on AI instead.
That's where they dangle the promise of a full-time hire and give you a temp/dispatch contract instead.
Anyone who falls for that bait is incompetent anyway.
Wouldn't it be better to train up cheap young workers instead?
The reason things are declining across the board is probably that nobody can shake the habit of pushing the costs onto someone else.
Unless someone's willing to eat the loss and actually train people, overall quality is never going to improve.
Big companies are supposed to take on that role as a way of giving back to society, though.
Even if you train them, they quit right away, and Gen Z new grads hate being "trained" in the first place.
Whatever happened to those ¥400,000-a-month new grad salaries?
Those places were probably just recruiting cannon fodder with high turnover anyway, no?
But then talented people trained elsewhere come join you, right?
It's give and take.
If that's not happening, it just means the company doesn't have enough underlying strength to attract them.
"Someone needs to properly train the new grads!" "Wait… us? Nah, we're not doing that 😅"
Every company wants to free-ride off everyone else without putting in the effort themselves.
"If we don't raise wages, demand will drop!… but we're not raising ours."
Kind of the same vibe.
Also, since some people go and teach themselves even in a terrible environment, everyone ends up strangling each other by lowering the bar.
Isn't there some way to fix this all at once?
Nobody actually cares about the company's long-term future.
If you're not the owner, the ideal is to look busy, coast along cozying up to the incompetent people around you, and get out before it all catches up with you.
Nobody cares about you, man.
If it were knowledge you actually need as a working adult, fine, but it's all stuff you'll never use.
How much of what you need to know as a working adult can you even learn in school, though?
Uh, you do normally use language skills and math…
Well, everyone's circumstances are different.
In that case your opinion doesn't matter much either, so we're just going to talk past each other.
My opinion is a general statement of fact, but yours is just a personal impression.
"Wouldn't it be better" is exactly the kind of emotional opinion you're talking about.
Whatever, doesn't matter.
Guess I win this one.
At the company I quit, apparently two people had my position before me.
One got transferred to another department, the other one quit.
Stop assigning subordinates to someone like that over and over.
If you get assigned to a department nobody cares about, doesn't it follow that your mentor is also going to be someone nobody cares about?
Like being trained by someone who's already been put out to pasture.
And they actually quit in the end, right?
At my old job, whenever I asked my boss something he'd deliberately teach me the wrong answer.
According to him, the cycle was supposed to go:
boss teaches a lie → subordinate notices it's a lie → subordinate looks it up themselves → subordinate grows.
But one day he started complaining, "Why doesn't anyone come ask me questions anymore?"
Well, obviously, if you keep lying to people they're going to stop asking.
I'm on paid leave myself, but what's everyone else's excuse for being here giving serious replies right now?
They're probably on the management side.
You should spend your paid leave on something more worthwhile, man.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Talk of companies losing their appetite for hiring new graduates has come up repeatedly in recent years, but it’s a sharp reversal from just a few years ago, when Japan’s “extreme sellers’ market” saw reports of new grads landing monthly salaries as high as ¥400,000 as companies competed to secure young talent with generous offers. If that has now flipped toward hiring restraint, the explanation most often floated is the spread of generative AI, which is increasingly taking over routine desk work and some of the tasks once used to train new hires. That said, posters in the thread also argued this is simply the same old corporate reluctance to invest in training and aversion to the cost of developing staff — a pattern that predates AI. Whether AI or Japan’s long-standing approach to human-capital investment is the real driver remains disputed. It’s also worth noting that this “we don’t need new grads” argument is a different phenomenon from the hiring crunch faced by the “lost generation” (job seekers who graduated during Japan’s earlier economic downturns) — even though both get described as companies “cutting back on hiring,” the underlying circumstances differ by era.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Live Commentary General) thread “[Ultra Breaking] Big Companies: ‘Ngl, We Don’t Really Need New Grads lol’.”
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