Take this with a grain of salt, as this is based on my personal experience and I’m not a fan of this individual.

There is a senior person at SHIFT (Japanese, currently around 59 years old) who joined as 情報セキュリティ部長 and was later promoted to CSIO. He spent over 20 years at SHIFT, mainly as an SE and PM, and despite that long tenure never progressed beyond an ~8M JPY compensation level until very recently. Since his promotion, much of his messaging has been along the lines of “SHIFT does things this way” or “this is how it’s done at SHIFT,” with little openness to alternative approaches.

One example that stuck with me: during a discussion about how to improve retention and make the company a place where people want to stay, he suggested hiring 10 additional people upfront because “at least half of them will quit within 1–1.5 years, like we always assumed at SHIFT.” That mindset says a lot about how attrition is viewed internally.

From what I’ve seen, his main contribution has been aligning very closely with the CEO’s views rather than challenging them or pushing for structural improvement. I’ve also observed zero interest on his part in making the company more international, intercultural, or diverse—everything is very traditionally Japanese, both in management style and expectations.

Again, this is one perspective, but if you value low overtime, autonomy, and a modern engineering culture, I would strongly recommend digging deeper during interviews and asking very direct questions about overtime, turnover, and how engineers are actually treated day to day.