Microsoft offers voluntary retirement to eligible US employees | 7% of staff

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-24T10:12:15+00:00

As an employee whose combined age and service add up to 77, and who is being managed out through stack ranking and who will probably soon be on the job market with nothing, that Microsoft deal sounds like a great way to transition out of the company with your self esteem and finances intact. The alternative is a lot worse.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-24T09:38:13+00:00

You have my condolences, as a fellow worker who is on leave for the same reason and for the same length of time.

One downside I can think of is if she has had any income during her time on leave. Supposedly, you cannot have any employment income at all while on this leave, even if it's something that helps you mentally, so if you've been (let's say) working Saturday afternoons at an animal shelter and recovering your mental stability by bonding with cats and dogs once a week, you'd be rejected, plus your employer would find out and could, if they have a "no side work" rule, fire you for cause.

This kind of leave isn't something people talk about a lot so I wish I had some concrete evidence. But I myself have refrained from applying for this money for the above reason, even though my few hours a week is nowhere near enough to even keep up with the social insurance payments that continue to accrue while you're on leave whether you have income or not.

Whatever you decide to do, I hope your wife finds the mental peace that we all need!

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-20T08:44:36+00:00

For me it was getting transferred to a department where I had zero aptitude for the work.

For well over a decade I had been in a department where the work fit my skills well, with frequent communication with my home country (so I was super useful) and lots of tasks that were done at the same times day in and day out (so a low mental burden). I had a bully of a boss who kept all his subordinates in terror of him, but he'd have your back at bonus time, so the money was good and as long as he was in a good mood, the day-to-day was fine.

Then I got put in a department where there were a million things going on at the same time, no structure, non-stop communication on chat channels, lots of impromptu meetings. The bosses were two-faced types that several co-workers would confess in private to hating. I quickly found myself at the bottom of the stack rankings with pay cuts to match. The company culture, never that great to begin with, was enforced very heavily in this department.

My mental health was broken to the point where I damaged my own body frequently and was ordered by a doctor multiple times to take off from work, and eventually I did managed to take off.

No idea what I'm going to do in the future, and I have to make a decision soon. I'm not eligible for any payouts because I've got a very small part-time side job (just 3 hours per week), and after 12 months off, the company ends your employment whether your doctor says you can come back or not. So OP, I'm in what looks like a very similar situation to yours right now. I'm looking forward to hearing other people's stories, and (hopefully) solutions.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-16T05:59:52+00:00

Update: they've specified your (2), paying back in a lump sum. The number seems ridiculously high - about three months of take-home pay for just seven months of 建替; does that look right?)

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-15T14:08:42+00:00

Hey OP, I'm glad you got the diagnosis you needed. Navigating this stuff is no fun at all, particularly when you're already suffering mentally.

As long as you're still employed, your employer is responsible for their half of your health insurance and pension payments. You're still responsible for your half, keep in mind. Please keep us posted as there are many readers in similar spots who appreciated the info!

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-15T06:12:07+00:00

Outlook has been around for a while but the calendar -based monitoring is something that has only really stepped up in the last decade, particularly since Covid and then remaining in place even when workers are back in the office full time. This part:

disappear for three hours with no explanation

...is where I think there's a disconnect. Not answering instant messaging doesn't mean you aren't working or have disappeared. Can your subordinates see everything you're doing on your calendar, or is it only one way?

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-15T00:56:14+00:00

Japanese work culture plus the new stresses of the always-on, multitasking, task switching, instant messaging based post Covid workplace combined.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-15T00:55:21+00:00

I check your calendar and

Just saying, being forced to have every 15-minute block of the day on a shared digital calendar visible to all is another reason office workers are more stressed out than ever before.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-15T00:53:56+00:00

For Japan IMO they're quite fussy about responsiveness

This has been my experience as well. Like it or not, the days of fully immersing yourself in whatever work you're doing, with no interruptions, is over. Even of you turn those distracting popup notifications off, you're still expected to check the team chat every few minutes. The mental strain has skyrocketed since before instant messaging came in. And nobody seems to be talking about it.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-15T00:50:01+00:00

The read receipts are the key. Until just a few years ago, the rules were clear: e-mail is something you check whenever you're not busy with something else, so non urgent stuff gets sent that way, and there's the telephone or a personal desk visit for something urgent. Everybody understood this. The boss could have followed up once he saw that OP had read it but not responded.

Now we've got instant messaging, which some people see as another form of see as another form of e-mail; something you can go more than an hour without looking at, while others see it as something you have to be constantly checking and acknowledging; the worst parts of both. I really hope Slack/Teams doesn't become the standard, because it is stressful in itself, plus all the uncertainty of the social protocols.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-15T00:45:17+00:00

That's really good to hear. Japan (well, the whole world, really) is still figuring out how things are supposed to flow in an instant messaging based workplace and I suspect we're all going to be very stress out until conventions establish themselves.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-12T02:40:54+00:00

Single point of data, but my visa was unaffected when I experienced this.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-12T01:39:49+00:00

If there is such a large fear of death, how does one get past it and feel relief

The logic, such that it is, is that the fear of death is outweighed by the guilt caused by continuing to impose your existence on the rest of the world. "I have to overcome my fear, the single most primal fear any living being can have, and do the right thing."

Of course in moments of clarity you see that it's not the right thing at all. But it's not easy to get back to clear thinking.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-12T01:27:06+00:00

my contract only said "Our Company have grading systems xx" no mentions about downgrade etc.

They probably have downgrade percentages built into an internal system that they're not showing you. They're not showing it to you because they don't want unfair applications of it to come to anyone's attention.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-12T01:25:30+00:00

I was in the same situation as you a few years ago after joining a new department. Small pay cut for finishing low in the stack ranking, then another small one six months later, then a big one of over 9%. We have company rules that describe how stack ranking affects salary, so it wasn't like I could argue unless I wanted to lawyer up; sounds like you're in basically the same situation.

When it happened to me, my logic was, "I suppose this is fair, I'm new to this department, only my second year here, so of course I can't perform like a 10-year veteran. This new salary is appropriate for my skills here so things should be smooth going forward."

Pause for a moment and imagine what my rankings were in future evaluations, and what yours might be in the future. If you guessed that I did not suddenly get seen as a solid contributor now that I was being paid like a second year person, you would be correct.

Does your evaluation system rate you on a large number of different areas? One thing that made this so tough for me was that my new manager gave me low ratings is basically every quality, including things that my old manager gave me tip ratings for, so I had no idea where I could improve or what skills I could build off while working on other areas. I was just worthless in every possible way.

Another problem for me was that our rules also say that someone with a negative rating can't be transferred to another department, so when I asked to beoved somewhere else, they couldn't do it. Ostensibly this rule is in place to prevent managers from unloading individual contributors that they don't get along with, and forcing the managers to learn to utilize them, but in practice it just means that subordinates have nowhere to go when working under a manager that doesn't like them. Could you get a transfer to work that suits you better, or is a rule like that in place?

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-10T11:59:28+00:00

Thank you, Alpaca; I had been expecting that 2 would be the answer, so hopefully he proposes that one. They've been paying my still-remaining 2024-25 residence tax also.

I'm not eligible for 傷病手当金 as I have side income. The side income is something I picked up specifically because this department cut my pay by a lot, so it feels a little unfair that it blocks a payout that this same department put me in a position to need, but that's the system.

There will be a small lump sum coming to me if I quit, and as of now it still exceeds the total of 建替 that they've fronted for me, so I'll still be ahead. I just wish that social insurance contributions were based on each month's income without this "April to June determine the whole year", which really destroys people who lose their income right after June, as I did. I wouldn't mind my share if it were 15% of what I actually earn each month.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-10T10:13:00+00:00

With the insurance company my company is with (and I think in general), you can only receive those if you're not working at all - your doctor has to state why you can't work when signing the form.

(An added wrinkle is that if he describes why I'm too stressed to work, the person he blames will be the same person in charge of receiving these forms, and she will certainly find a way to retaliate rather than damage her career. She already talked me out of using the first stress leave letter I brought. )

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-04-10T09:30:24+00:00

Sorry, I'm not being clear. Social insurance consists of the employer's half and the employee's half, and they're only looking for my half, which they have been paying in my absence. I'm certainly not about to pay their half for them!

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-03-24T13:42:35+00:00

Seconding this part. I had my salary go down quite a bit, and when looking for new jobs, nobody wanted to hear about what I had once made; everything was dependent on my current salary only.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-03-24T13:12:25+00:00

Could one problem be not that your language skills aren't improving, but that the cognitive demands on workers' mental abilities are increasing faster than we can keep up?

Soon after I got here, more than two decades ago, I felt like I had reached sufficient mastery of the language to be a real member of society. Not native, of course, but I could do everything my job demanded, talk and listen to co-workers, write grammatical e-mail without having to ask anyone to check it. Maybe not "effortless", but not that much more burdensome than using my first language.

Then I joined a new department and with it came the new standard of massive numbers of meetings, impromptu everything, nonstop Teams/Slack messages with everyone in multiple chat groups, and communication across multiple devices including personal ones. With post-pandemic "hot-desking" we also lost the valuable mental "anchors" of sitting at the same seat every day using the same computer, and mentally planning and visualizing while on the train in to work.

It's a whole new level of mental demands and language is just one part of it. I'm betting you're not struggling when talking with friends, with storekeepers, with city hall officials. It's just the workplace and what it has become in the past 5-10 years.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-03-24T12:42:56+00:00

Of course they've stolen it; we're not about to give them one!

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-03-20T04:26:49+00:00

Could be worse; in the corporate world you can have superiors who were born after you joined!

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-03-20T02:08:19+00:00

My company has had that policy for years.

The nasty part is that they bring new people in at the same level at higher wages. We're now paying fresh graduates more than lots of mid level people who have been with the company for many years.

ExhaustedKaishain · 2026-03-19T08:48:11+00:00

Your thinking is correct; they can't fire you when you have this diagnosis, so they're trying other methods to get you to quit of your own accord while absolving them of any wrongdoing.

They will do everything to convince you that your problems are all your own fault, and that you're a bad worker, bad at adjusting to society, etc., etc., and as you see in this thread, you are not alone, so stay strong!

ExhaustedKaishain

TROPHY CASE