My interview with Degica Japan: An unfortunate end to a promising opportunity
Tags: career, interview
Published: 2023-05-02 04:46:10

Degica is a leading provider of Japanese digital commerce solutions. One of their product is Komoju, a payment gateway platform that enables businesses to accept payments from customers in Japan and around the world.

As a ruby developer with an interest in fintech, I was excited about the opportunity to interview with Degica. I went through several interview stages and was offered a position with the company, but unfortunately, my experience did not end as I had hoped.

### The Story:

I went through all interview stages successfully the first being a call with some of the team members to discuss about my side projects, why i'm interested in Degica, etc..

Second interview was more technical and was given access to a private repo where i had to fix failing tests which was followed with a discussion about other technical questions in a real case scenario. Ex: We have this bug in production, why do you think it's happening? how would you go about fixing it?, etc...

Third interview was with the management team(CTO and COO) where we discussed salaries, expectations, starting date among other things. Everything was going well so far.

I received an offer, negotiated my salary and came to a mutual agreement of my salary. I also asked if i could start in August(2022) and take July as a month off to which they agreed to.

I resigned to my previous job, travelled back to japan(since i couldn’t before, because of covid restrictions) and met with some of the team members over lunch. I told them about my plan to leave japan for a while and that i would start working with Degica remotely for the first months. Everything still good.

A few weeks later, i received an email from Degica asking about my starting date, my expectation for remote work, etc.. we jumped on a call where they explained to me that onboarding have to be done in JST time zone and that they would require me to work JST timezone which was never mentioned during the interview process since it clearly said that they work Full remote and hires everywhere in the world.

We ended the call with them apologizing that it should have been cleared from the beginning and that they would extend my starting date and told me to think about it and let them know 2 weeks before my return to Japan.

A few weeks later(25th July) i send them an email informing them that i'll be traveling back to japan so we can arrange onboarding. All crickets until 2nd of August when i received an email from someone in the administration department saying that my offer has been rescinded because i do not fit Degica culture for 2 reasons:
- My resume had a Japanese address(which was my address btw) but this was an issue since i was not "residing" there at the time of application
- I delayed to reply to their email (mind you we had agreed to let them know 2 weeks ahead of my return to japan as per the last correspondence i had with them)

And that became the end of what i thought was going to be an interesting journey in my career.

I believe the reasons they gave shouldn't be enough to cancel a contract but as we say in Kinyarwanda; "Ntawe uburana n'umuhamba" so we move 🏎💨 

## Conclusion

Even though my experience with Degica was disappointing, i believe it's a good company where one can strive especially if you are a ruby engineer.

And if you're an engineer working in Japan, i would advise you to quit your current job right after receiving the actual contract. not just the offer 🦾

In the meantime, if your company is into fintech/payment or developer tools and are looking for a passionate and skilled engineer, I'm open to new opportunities and would love to hear from you.