At first glance, this company seems to tick a lot of my personal checkboxes: it’s fully remote, they have a work abroad program where a few employees can travel while working, and they seem to be passionate about technology, working on personal projects and learning new tech in their free time. However, during the application process, there were plenty of red flags. Note that I am tweaking certain details a bit as an attempt to stay anonymous, but I shall preserve the overall gist of my experience. I submitted my application back in June 2024, but did not hear anything from them until August 2024. It took around two months before they got back to me after my initial submission. When we were trying to schedule an HR interview, I try to reply within one workday. When I replied to their email, they did not reply until more than a week later, stating that my reply got sent to their spam. “…Odd”, I thought, “Replies to existing email threads don’t usually get sent to spam, but sure, let’s continue scheduling the interview.” During the initial HR interview, the interviewer was four minutes late. I was five minutes early. There was no apology, nor an explanation as to why they were late. There was also no explanation as to why it took them two months before they got back to me. There were several inconsistencies during the interview. When the interview started, the interviewer mentioned that there were only 4-5 members within a specific part of the engineering team. Further down the interview, when I confirmed that there were only 4-5 members, the interviewer corrected me, saying that there were 10 members. A minor inconsistency, but still kind of strange that it exists. However, the most glaring inconsistency to me was when I asked about prepaid overtime. The interviewer said that the engineers here have “good work-life balance”; but the interviewer’s prepaid overtime is a whopping 45 hours a month, and this was after they apparently confirmed, by double-checking their own contract. This means that employees will not get paid overtime for the first 45 hours of it per month, and will only get overtime pay from the 46th hour onwards… and this is just for HR. If your company’s HR staff has a prepaid overtime of 45 hours/month, I cannot imagine how much prepaid overtime the engineers have. While it’s possible to have good work-life balance despite having a 45-hour prepaid overtime (i.e.: actual overtime is only around an hour or two per month), I still think it’s strange to have that clause in the contract and claim to have “good work-life balance.“ (If you tone it down to 30 hours or less, it may be slightly more believable.) All in all, there were several alarm bells ringing, and my gut was telling (more like yelling at) me to stay away, so I opted to not wait for the interview result and just cancel my application.

Applications are not automatically acknowledged, and response might take some time. The initial call will be an interview, talk about past projects, achievements and technical ability in light context. The second stage is technical Interview, where there candidates 30 minutes to resolve unit tests on a Ruby project. Then a few technical questions where asked mostly about the Ruby language. The third stage is a personality interview. What are the interests of the company and the desire to work in Japan? Then offer stage. Defining initial monthly salary, Profit Share, Health Insurance, Holidays, Language Lessons, and expected Work hours. Finally, a couple of questions from the CTO and a virtual tour of the office completed this process. After the offer call, a follow-up email with questions for salary negotiations and additional benefits sent. At this point, Degica did not enter into negotiations and decided to retract the offer entirely and not follow up with a call or feedback to the reasoning for retracing the offer.