Inside SES — The Reality of Japan's Engineer Dispatch Industry

Japan has an enormous number of companies whose primary business isn’t building software — it’s dispatching engineers to client sites.

This industry is called SES (System Engineering Services).

For the rest of this piece, just read SES as “engineer dispatch.”

To be clear up front: not all of it is bad. There are genuinely good companies and plenty of strong engineers in the industry.

But structurally, parts of it are seriously distorted.

”You’re an Engineer — Now Go Work at the Electronics Store”

In Japan, a lot of people become engineers without prior tech experience. That’s not a bad thing in itself — the industry needs an entry point.

The problem is what happens after they’re hired.

Junior engineers with no real experience are obviously hard to place on projects. So while they wait for an assignment, they sometimes get sent to do something completely unrelated:

• Data center monitoring
• Call center work
• PC kitting (setting up corporate laptops)
• Selling electronics at retail stores

You might ask, “wait, how is that engineering?” — and you’d be right. But this happens, and not rarely.

Why Does This Even Happen?

One reason is Japan’s labor culture.

Compared to many countries, the bar for firing someone in Japan is much higher. Companies can terminate, but it’s not easy.

So the calculation becomes:

“Better to have them earning low rates somewhere than sit on the bench drawing full salary.”

Which leads to the common outcome:

“Just put them on a site, any site.”

A Case I Personally Ran Into

Years ago, when I was rolling off a project, an engineer came in to take over from me.

When we talked, it turned out they had no professional engineering experience at all.

Their previous role had been data center monitoring.

I was honestly shocked. The system being handed over absolutely required real development experience.

So I asked them straight up:

“Can you actually take this over?”

They looked uncomfortable, and answered honestly:

“I can’t.”

The honesty was refreshing. But predictably, they were quietly removed from the project before I left.

The Structure Quietly Incentivizes Resume Inflation

This is the more uncomfortable part.

In the SES world, people with limited experience routinely get sent to client sites listed as “experienced.”

Not everyone, obviously. But the structure makes it likely:

• Monitoring work gets written up as “infrastructure ops experience”
• A training period gets framed as “development experience”
• Some involvement in a team task gets logged as “led that work”

Why? Because years of experience translate directly to billing rate.

The predictable result: a client interviews someone, and the person clearly can’t do what’s on paper.

So Is SES All Bad?

This is where it gets complicated.

The truth is, a large portion of Japan’s IT industry runs on SES. Even major enterprises depend heavily on it. And it does function as a real entry point for people without formal CS backgrounds.

I personally met plenty of strong engineers working through SES contracts.

The problem isn’t the existence of SES. It’s the structural patterns:

• Sales priorities over training
• “Just put a body on the site”
• Skill mismatch with the actual work
• Multi-tier subcontracting that obscures accountability

In the AI era, I suspect the “send a headcount” model gets harder.

Once AI handles most of what juniors used to do, what clients need isn’t bodies — it’s people who can design, judge, and own quality. The headcount model doesn’t naturally produce those people.

Closing Thought

Becoming an engineer with no prior experience isn’t bad. If anything, the willingness to switch careers is admirable.

But what those people actually need isn’t to be shoved onto a client site as fast as possible — it’s to be properly trained.

The problem with SES isn’t the engineers. It’s the structure of the industry itself.