I resigned from Toshiba Corporation as of the end of March 2024 (Employment: April 2015 - March 2024).
I am indebted to so many people during my approximately 9 years at Toshiba. Thank you very much.
Work at Toshiba
The background of joining goes back to the summer internship in the first year of my master's degree.
In the summer of M1, I was debating whether to go to the Web-based internship of Speee or Rakuten. A pre-IPO startup or a mega-venture. I was informed that I passed the internship selection for Rakuten at 1st place among all applicants. Just then, I happened to find that Toshiba, a large corporation, was holding a Web-based internship, and thinking that taking a big risk with a pre-IPO startup or a stable large corporation would be good options, I decided to go to internships at Speee and Toshiba.
At the Speee internship, I participated in an advanced internship for engineers and spent a fulfilling 3 weeks developing a Web app in a team with very talented people. In the subsequent summer internship at Toshiba, I developed a certain Redmine plugin, which I completed in about a week.
I was surprised that I could engage in Web-based development at a large manufacturing company, and felt that I could be involved in work across a wide range of business areas, and that the section manager was high-spirited and it seemed fun to work there, so I chose Toshiba as my first career.
Assigned Department and Job Description
I was assigned to the Digital Innovation Technology Center (commonly known as DITC, formerly Software Engineering Center), the same department as my internship. This department has the mission of raising the technical level within the Toshiba Group and solves problems within the Toshiba Group in the form of commissioned research. It is a special environment where master's and doctoral graduates account for the majority, and one can be involved in commissions of various industries and fields.
There were Linux kernel maintainers, openSUSE maintainers, Ruby committers, people who graduated from former imperial universities by skipping grades, people with careers as visiting researchers in the Ivy League, people who received awards for excellent completion as working doctors, etc., making it a rare environment where excellent brains gathered. Recent R&D results are summarized in Digital Innovation Technology Center | Toshiba.
As a training system with a large impact on young people, there is an education system spanning about 6 years called Work Assignment (commonly known as WA).
WA is a system that promotes the improvement of technical skills and problem-solving abilities through the process of solving actual business and technical issues under a senior instructor called a mentor. It positions the 3rd year as elementary and the 6th year as intermediate engineers, and at each milestone, it is necessary to present the results of R&D so far in front of all members in DITC.
In this WA interview, the Center Director asked me, "There are two paths: a specialist who pursues one thing or a generalist who overlooks the whole. Which one are you?" Since I had decided to become independent eventually, I replied to educate me as a generalist. I decided to become a full-stack engineer in my first year.
Partly because my seniors liked me, I was really educated as I wished, and I was able to engage in software development from upper layer (Web) to lower layer (HDD Firmware), infrastructure layer (development using public cloud), and AI development. I was able to taste the real thrill unique to large companies, where I was allowed to work from upper layers to lower layers, which can never be experienced in startups. I am truly grateful.
I cannot write much detail about the job content, but in terms of collaboration with people outside the center, I was able to greatly broaden my previously narrow perspective through offshore development with a Vietnamese subsidiary, and discussions with IT giant Google and major strategic consulting firms.
There may be an image that the development environment is bad in large companies, but no need to worry. Initially, it was RAM: 4GB, but by consulting with my boss, I was able to obtain human rights of RAM: 32GB. Some people obtained high-performance GPUs sufficient for Deep Learning if they could provide a reason, and I sometimes borrowed them. I don't think people joining in the future will have trouble with the development environment.
Rare for a large company, we could touch AWS and GCP without troublesome applications, and we were not confined to a remote land where we had to develop only on-premise. It was very stressful that Teams and Outlook were forced, but other than that, I think it was a good environment.
About 24 days of annual leave were granted per year, and I was able to use them all every year. During GW in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I took annual leave to take 11 days off and rode a BRIDGESTONE TB-1e bicycle 1,300km from Toshiba's laboratory (Kawasaki City, Kanagawa) to my parents' home in Kumamoto City. You could call it a petite career break.
Since I was sometimes made fun of saying "Someone really appeared who used up all annual leave," boldness is necessary.
Looking back, I think the working style was very white. Childcare leave and maternity leave could be taken for several years, and there were some people to whom the so-called short-time work system applied, where working hours could be reduced by 2 hours until the child is in elementary school.
Returning to work, most recently, in a commissioned project for Toshiba Tec whose main business is POS registers, I had excellent compatibility with my boss and colleagues, and was evaluated for handling agile development at ultra-high speed, receiving a business award attached to the Center Director. After that, in my 7th year, the fastest timing, I was able to be seconded to Toshiba Tec's CDO (Chief Digital Officer) Office (so-called executive office).
Awards and Achievements
I think education was generous. Toshiba Tec had a system to fully subsidize the cost of public cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) certifications, which I fully utilized. I was able to acquire all AWS certifications in about one month.
In addition, I learned AI in general in "Toshiba AI Engineer Education" targeting the entire Toshiba Group, where professors from the University of Tokyo are lecturers. This education consists of two pillars: lectures for several months, followed by implementing AI individually and presenting the results.
Those who make excellent presentations at the results presentation meeting are commended by the executive officer as excellent performers.
While section managers and above from my center also took the course, there were times when no winners appeared despite being a research institute, so I decided to aim for the award and took the course when I thought I could win.
Successfully, I became the first winner from my center.
Awards etc. are as follows. After joining Toshiba, days of hardship continued where I could not easily receive awards, but finally bloomed in the last few years. I think if you work desperately, you can gain enough power to be effective outside the company.
- —▼Toshiba▼—
- Jan 2024: Acquired all AWS Certifications (First in Toshiba Corp., 2nd in Toshiba Group)
- Mar 2023: Toshiba AI Engineer Education (Joint development with UTokyo) Session A 2nd Place (First winner from my center. Total of about 20 people took the course from the center)
- Dec 2022: Toshiba Internal CTF (Capture The Flag) 5th out of 68th (Based on SecBok2016, equivalent to CISO top level)
- Apr 2022: Toshiba Digital Innovation Technology Center Business Award Excellence Award
- —▼Student▼—
- Dec 2014: DPSWS2014 Excellent Poster Award
- Aug 2014: DICOMO2014 Excellent Paper Award
- Jul 2014: DICOMO2014 Best Presentation Award (1st out of 293th)
- Sep 2013: Speee Inc. Speee Award (Advanced Internship Winner)
- Jan 2012: Seed Acceleration Program MOVIDA SCHOOL 2nd Batch
- 2006: Tokyo Tech / Osaka Univ. Supercomputing Contest Finalist
Reason for Leaving Toshiba
Until Deciding to Resign
Why quit when the situation seems smooth sailing? The reason goes back to when I was interning at a startup.
Immediately after entering graduate school, I actually took a leave of absence to do an internship. What left a strong impression was Akatsuki Inc. (TYO: 3932), a social game development startup with about 30 people at the time. I joined at the timing when feature phones were shifting to smartphones. I witnessed the excitement that something might happen in the phase where the market is rapidly rising, and the overwhelming engagement where everyone pushes forward with all their might in the same direction, feeling a sense of fulfillment I had never felt before. Akatsuki delivers products to people all over the world with the concept of "Into the hands of people all over the world."
If you are an engineer, everyone would want to deliver the product they created to many people. At this time, I decided that I would do this when the timing comes someday.
At Akatsuki, I felt firsthand that if you do a startup, you enter at the dawn of the market, that is, timing is more important than anything else. After joining Toshiba, I had been waiting for this timing for a long, long time. I believe market excitement has cycles. Looking at stock prices in macro, it rises in a 10-12 year cycle. Just when I thought that wave would come around the 10th year of joining the company, as expected, at that timing (2023~2024), three markets of Generative AI, Spatial Computing, and Cryptocurrency rose.
In the personal development of Generative AI released last year (2023), it was featured in Web media of some listed companies, and the number of registered users exceeded 2,700, convincing me from primary information that this wave of Generative AI is really coming.
My intuition appealed to me that this is exactly the time to do it.
Don't let noise of others opinion drown out your own inner voice.
And most important have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Inc.
However, although I joined with the decision to become independent from the beginning, I was also anxious about whether it was okay to quit a super-large company.
Company's Management Situation
Needless to say, the company's management situation greatly influenced my resignation.
I joined in 2015, and experienced a very rare event where the company was shaken by accounting fraud during the new employee training 2 months after joining. It had a big impact around me, such as people in the same department leaving the company saying "I really didn't want to quit," and colleagues being transferred to subsidiaries. At this time, I felt firsthand that there is no stability even in large companies. Sales halved from 6.6 trillion yen to 3.3 trillion yen, and the number of employees also halved from 200,000 to 100,000. Excellent businesses such as home appliances, semiconductors, and medical systems were sold off one after another.
Seniors I respected deeply resigned one after another. This is exactly what they mean when they say excellent people leave first. I don't know if it was the influence of the fraud, but the delisting rules of the TSE changed, and the three presidents involved in the accounting fraud did not receive criminal punishment due to the statute of limitations, etc., so I was often pointed at by various people.
In addition, overtime was strictly regulated by the 36 Agreement, deemed overtime hours for discretionary labor were also halved, and annual income dropped by more than 1 million yen, affecting my life. I was told by seniors in the workplace that those who joined from 2015 are suffering hardships arguably the most ever, which was very painful.
There was also anxiety in terms of finance. While Hitachi, Ltd., which conducts very similar businesses, shifted its portfolio to digital, I feel a sense of crisis in the infrastructure-heavy portfolio. IT giants such as Microsoft announced investing unprecedented amounts of trillions of yen in AI research. It can be said that this increased the possibility that the infrastructure business, which seems stable at present, will be overturned. Although I am an outsider in this field, for example, a new technology might be developed that can be installed in homes and sufficiently cover household power.
"Things like common sense, morals, and ethics are easily rewritten in units of 5 or 10 years."
by Takafumi Horie
Around the time my company life was approaching its 9th year, I received an unofficial offer for an attractive position of a 3-year overseas assignment as a talent to launch a new business. However, although I judged that I had gained sufficient power as an engineer and wanted to be involved in business 0 -> 1, I had mixed feelings about being treated as an engineer and using the company's money while existing businesses were in a difficult situation.
At Akatsuki, I was so cheerful that I was called the mood maker of the company, but after joining Toshiba, I was feeling depressed due to various circumstances. I repeated binge eating and drinking due to stress, and acquaintances I met after a long time were worried, asking "Did something happen at Toshiba? Why have you aged so much?"
At the career boundary, the market is rising, so I decided to live following my intuition this time, and decided to take a career break here.
Future Outlook
As for future prospects, since I will be unemployed for the first time in my life, I don't know left from right. Regarding the products to be released in the future, it suits my nature to think carefully and decide, so I plan to let it sit for a few months.
With the concept of "Into the hands of people all over the world," I will deliver products that influence many people.
Please look forward to the future of the unemployed. Thank you very much.