Six months have passed since I joined this company, and — not as a criticism, but simply as an observation — things turned out very different from what I imagined. My imagination was too thin in college, I suppose. The gap between what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be, and where I actually am is staggering. Today I want to think through that. This is partly self-reflection, and partly a milestone I want to capture in writing so I can look back on it after one year, two years, further along in my working life.
These are the ramblings of a new hire — still fresh enough to count as one. Written for my future self, as a marker I can return to when I look back from a year or two down the road. (For context: my role is project-related work at a general trading company — the department I requested from the time I received my offer, and one I believe I was placed in accordingly.)
1. Buried under an endless rain of internal administrative work
The title says 90% of it. The result is a constant feeling of "Who is this work actually for? What is it actually for?"
This is partly a function of the business model I'm in. When you're in an investment-heavy model — putting large amounts of capital to work and managing assets — you rarely see the face of the end user. That's one of the things I've felt most strongly since joining.
Instead, enormous internal resources go into figuring out how to minimize the company's risk exposure. I spend more time facing inward, toward the organization, than outward, toward the customer (even if, ultimately, everything is theoretically for the customer — it's just so far upstream that imagining the downstream customer is genuinely difficult). I've accepted that this is natural and appropriate.
At the same time, "Are you always facing the customer?" is probably the top-ranked value for many people in how they think about work. For those people, this business model would be painful. I hear that more students are expressing interest in investment-oriented work at trading companies (probably because it's featured heavily in the news), but you should interrogate your own values carefully before making that choice. Stop picking companies based on the size of their deals.
For me: not the best way to work, but not bad either.
2. I had not considered the downsides of working at a large company
A direct consequence of the company being so large is that organizational decision-making — and therefore work — moves extremely slowly. It's genuinely surprising. Everyone who works at a large corporation says the same thing. I'm starting to accept it as just how things are.
I had convinced myself, and heard from seniors, that trading companies — built on a culture of continuously transforming their own business models to survive — would make decisions relatively quickly. But recently, trading companies have been moving away from small deals toward larger and larger investments. As a result, the discretion that used to be handed to junior staff is shrinking, replaced by work that only experienced, seasoned people can really judge. That's my sense from the inside — and looking at the headline-grabbing mega-investments in the news, you can feel it too.
Add to that the fact that each single risk gets scrutinized by corporate planning, risk management, finance, accounting, compliance, legal, and numerous other back-office functions from every possible angle. Multi-directional review inevitably takes time. Above a certain deal size, the company has built internal systems that require this scrutiny, and the cost of running all those teams means small, low-margin businesses are increasingly being cut. I sometimes wonder whether this trend is sustainable. Are we losing diversity? Is the portfolio becoming dangerously concentrated? Are we losing the ability to take experimental risks? Is synergy across businesses getting harder to achieve?
I suppose the senior leadership is thinking hard about this. As a first-year, that kind of information never trickles down to me — I have no way of knowing.
One note for job seekers: several trading companies appear to be pursuing quite aggressive investment strategies, and some seem to be overextending beyond their financial capacity. If I had learned to read financial statements — things like the net D/E ratio — back in my student days, I could have made more informed judgments. Worth considering.
For me: I had fantasized about my first year being full of challenges I couldn't handle, failing, and learning from it. That's not what happened. Instead, judgment on anything substantial is concentrated almost entirely at the manager level. A career life divorced from any sense of speed feels hollow, and I often wonder what to do about it. Well, I'll figure something out.
3. Eight-thousand-yen proofreading
Whenever I create presentation materials for internal approvals, senior people inevitably correct the grammar and phrasing. There are department heads who pour their full energy into exactly this. This is not an exaggeration. Their compensation, conservatively estimated, is around 15 million yen per year — near the top of the Japanese salaried employee range.
At 8 hours of work per day, that works out to roughly 8,000 yen per hour. And that's the work these highly compensated decision-makers pour their passion into: grammar and phrasing.
For me: If I'm in a position of real authority and real decision-making power, and the most absorbing work available is fixing particles and punctuation — would I find that interesting? Money is fine, but without the joy of the work itself or anything to learn from it, I don't think I could sustain it.
4. Time passes without any sense of growth
Thinking about what lies ahead after sacrificing the present makes me shudder with anxiety. Am I actually developing any capabilities? Am I soaking in a sweet, comfortable mediocrity and letting my ambitions slowly break? Am I convincing myself I'm enjoying things I actually can't enjoy, wearing a mask of contentment? These doubts come up often. Honestly, I think my current workplace is quite soft, and given the structural issues I've described, opportunities are hard to come by. The cycle of failing and learning from it is difficult to run.
Some of my peers are completely buried in internal work — grinding from early morning past the last train, being drilled in the company's internal processes. I can see that life is pretty grueling for them. But I also wonder whether that's actually building market value. It might be building internal value — but is that the same thing? (I came across someone on Twitter distinguishing between "internal value" and "market value," and it landed with me.)
When I occasionally have lunch with those peers, I often hear them say directly: "I don't feel like I'm growing." It seems we share the feeling.
For me: I want to develop capabilities that are genuinely distinctive — the kind no one else can replicate. Market value, not just internal value. If I invest time in skills that only work inside this company, I carry real risk: what happens if the company falters, or if I'm trying to build a business overseas and none of it applies? I don't believe the company exists to protect me. That belief runs deep. But the smallness of my growth in these six months is genuinely alarming. I haven't even settled on which domain I want to build expertise in. I need to take action to figure out what kind of market value I want to carry as a person.
I wonder what my college-self would think seeing this. The question is what I do with the next six months. I've spent six months already — I have to make those a stepping stone, no matter what.
