Fantastic Benefits, Friendly People, Boring Work
Pros
Competitive salaries, and most people tend to be quite friendly. Bonuses depend on company profits earned the previous year, and raises seem reasonable. As is true with most places, your quality of life at work will depend heavily on your manager. Most managers seem fairly straightforward and honest, so that doesn't seem like a huge problem here. Even though early and late night meetings are inevitable with Japanese coworkers, flex time at the office is incredibly helpful. It's not uncommon to leave an hour early if you have an 8pm meeting that you can just do from home. Your ability to utilize flex time depends on the manager's discretion, however. DENSO's products seem to be well respected.
Cons
The two biggest issues with working at DENSO are rooted in the fact that it is a Japanese company. Product development happens in Japan, sales strategies are decided in Japan, nearly everything is done there. There are efforts to bring capabilities to America, which is a positive, but you can expect to never get replies from your Japanese coworkers until your customer is breathing down your neck here in America. Expect either really early meetings (6am) or very late (7-9pm) just to talk with your Japanese coworkers on conference calls due to the time difference. Good luck if no one speaks good english, because they use Google translator for emails. If they don't understand English in an email, they will simply not respond rather than ask for clarification most of the time, even if the issue is urgent. Because so much work is done in Japan, American engineers are stuck being translators between the Japanese designers and the American customers. This job is 10% translating, 30% testing products onsite with the customers, and 60% waiting for the next email from Japan to translate.
