Haha, it's true, man. I recently moved to Japan to live with family for a while. I interviewed at the top Japanese software companies in Japan, and even though I'm a senior engineer with 10 years' experience in FAANG in the USA, they felt like they were doing me a favor offering me 15 million JPY/year (150k USD at 100 yen per dollar, ~$130k USD at the time with the beefy US dollar). Tokyo is actually a little cheaper to live in than Seattle assuming you're OK with a tiny Tokyo apartment and a long Tokyo commute, but it isn't THAT much cheaper.
I tried to politely explain how and why people like me command the kind of salaries we do in the USA, but they just didn't get it. At 15M JPY I'd rather just work in the USA for a year, then take a year off in Japan, so that's what I ended up doing, haha.
All the local Japanese software giants are slowly being strangled to death on their home turf, and they're completely failing to compete internationally. It's a real shame, but oh well!
Sometimes I think the HN community is vastly out of touch with normal everyday humans, and comments like this validate it.
If you're making 7 million yen a year, you're making really fucking good money. If you're making 10 million, that company is really kissing your ass and you're essentially royalty. But 15 million is low?
Keep in mind that GDP per capita in Japan is only about 2/3 of America's, and also that the wealth divide is pretty much non-existent while America is basically two parallel societies: people who struggle to get by (or close to it) and the rich and carefree, and thinking 15 mil is low is just insanity. People would work 5 years at that job and retire to Okinawa with that cash.
>Tokyo is actually a little cheaper to live in than Seattle
That's an understatement. It's tremendously cheaper. You can get an apartment near your workplace, eat out 15 times a week, and still only spend half the money you'd spend on a decent in-city apartment in Seattle or SF.
>I tried to politely explain how and why people like me command the kind of salaries we do in the USA, but they just didn't get it.
Oh, no, they got it. They just wondered why someone thinks anyone gets paid that much. Not even most doctors are making that much. You basically requested CEO wages and thought they were crazy.
He isn't out of touch with reality. The economy works on supply and demand. He can make more money in country than another doing the same job, so he chose the country that paid him more. It's perfectly reasonable. It's not about it being a good or bad salary, it's just what the market will bear.
He can definitely get paid more in Seattle if he wants to. That's true. He will also have a cost of living that's pretty much double what it would be in Japan.
And true, it's an issue of supply and demand. He demanded too much and supply isn't there.
His problem is that he thinks they're strange for not just offering more money, not considering that, maybe, just maybe, a country with lower wages and smaller GDP simply can't pay people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year+bonus for jobs. When you think of it purely in the context of big number=good, then it's bad. When you consider Japan is a much cheaper country and there are other benefits (like not having to deal with ridiculously expensive American health care, good public transportation, etc), it's clearly by no means a bad deal. It's a deal probably nobody else in that company's history ever was or ever will be offered ever again.
> His problem is that he thinks they're strange for not just offering more money
I don't think he thinks they're strange, he's just surprised. When you visit France and can buy high quality wine for half the cost that you get in the U.S., it's surprising. When you go to Singapore and see that housing can often be more expensive than luxury apartments in NYC, it's surprising. Similarly, when you go to Japan and see people doing the same thing you do, but making 30%+ less, it's surprising.
Maybe the cost of living and government provided social services make up for some of this difference, maybe they don't. But having some initial sticker shock in the price differential can be pretty natural.
If he has a problem, it's that he thinks a unit of work should be valued equally , i.e., if I do X, it should be universally valued at $Y. It's a nice thought, and I'd like to wish it was true, but it's not how our economy works. The value of X is not intrinsic, it's based on what someone is willing to pay for it.
Coal mining in the U.S. in the 1950s provided a solid middle class foundation, but the same job today does not. Beethoven is clearly a better musician than most pop music, but few today would shell out money to listen to his music, while they would for many popular artists.
Hopefully from this, he can realize how lucky he is to have access to a country which, for a variety of reasons, values this type of production more than other places in the world.
It’s really not that programmers are more “valued” and everyone who isn’t paying them enough money to buy a new house yearly isn’t properly appreciating them. It’s that one country can afford to pay more, and it’s partly enabled by a massive wealth disparity.
Being surprised is strange. It’s like being surprised that people get paid less in Poland and that companies won’t pay as much for a programmer there. Nobody has the money to pay for $300000/year programmers in Poland. It’s the same virtually everywhere except incredibly expensive corners of the world, like parts of America and Switzerland.
For the same reason that China is trouncing Taiwan in tech hiring, you need to beat your competitors. What's reasonable to give to someone else to make them do what you want depends on what your competitors do.
Framing it as "think of what another Japanese person would be making" is all wrong. We can say the exact same thing about Taiwan, and we surely wouldn't say the way for Taiwan to move forward is to tell candidates, "You just don't understand Taiwan. It has a very different way of life." Those candidates will understand Chinese money, the same way this person understood American money.
Taiwan is also an absolutely tiny economy compared to China. That money has to come from somewhere. In the case of many countries, it means paying most workers peanuts while paying someone else 10x as much.
Some on HN are okay with massive wealth disparity and think it’s great for some international programmer to be valued far more than any local just because they worked at a company like Facebook. Some countries, like Taiwan and Japan, aren’t on that train.
And that's why Taiwan is in a brain drain to China and the US. Chinese companies don't need to make the same excuses as Taiwanese companies when it comes to money.
Hey, Afghanis and Sudanese people out there, want to fix your country? Just quit being poor. Pay money that you don’t have. It’s what the two largest, most powerful, wealthiest countries in the world do, so why can’t you? No excuse not to pay them the same as a Silicon Valley startup getting funding that dwarfs your GDP.
Aside from throwing people out on the streets and cutting wages for the middle class in order to support some yuppie JavaScript coders from another country, it’s not economically possible to just poof money into existence to pay ridiculous wages. I mean yeah, America does it and that works for some people here. Most people despise that.
You're looking at the economy and business in general completely wrong. You have a SERIOUS fundamental misunderstanding of how it works.
There isn't a fixed pool of X trillion dollars per year for all companies and government agencies to split up among workers.
If a company gives $300k to some guy in Silicon Valley, he'll turn around and give it to other people providing him with goods and services. They in turn spend the money on things they need.
What people should despise is losing their best and brightest to companies overseas. You're talking about immigration, but that doesn't make a brain drain.
It's low relatively speaking to what that person can get in the US. When you are on the global market, you can compare between countries. On top of that devs are quite underpaid in Japan especially at the beginning of their careers, it's not an outlandish claim.
15 million JPY/year is a lot of money. If the wages in America are really that high, Japan has trouble recruiting top talent from America, that's for sure. It might be that the Japanese companies aren't lean enough to able to afford wages like that.
Btw. another data point: I am a junior software engineer in Tokyo and I currently earn a bit over 6 million. I'm able to live very comfortably with that. I'm aiming for 8-9 million, but I'd expect you have to be an actual rock star developer for anything over that.
Note that 150k is just the salary. I don’t know about Japanese compensation structure, but you can easily get >200k including bonus + equity at FAANG in a junior position.
Me and my family are living very comfortably with less than that, honestly. And I don't expect any noticeable increase in earnings at this point in our lives. I don't personally know and never have in these past few decades anyone earning more than 10 million yen. Maybe if we go back to the 80s.
The only one earning more than 10M who I know of is a senpai of mine who quit and got a remote Silicon Valley job. It’s a lucrative deal as you can live affordably in Tokyo. (Still, I suspect they’d pay remote workers somewhat worse...) As for myself, I wouldn’t move for 15M. The present-day U.S. sounds a great place to earn money as a SE, but it doesn’t sound like a good place to live.
If you have a good resume and can justify good software engineering skills in demand, it is not that difficult to get to 10 millions JPY or more, even outside the big foreign companies (Google, Nvidia, etc.). Indeed in Tokyo starts paying 9-10 millions JPY for people w/ 2-3 years experience after college.
I know people working in large Japanese companies with 15 years+ experience can make 15-20 millions JPY once they become principal and co.
It is true that Japan, like Europe, pays much more people willing to go management/product management/sales, compared to the US where you can stay on a technical path and make very good money, at least up to a certain age.
But please do not think that 6-7 millions JPY is good salary in Tokyo: it is not. The average salary in Japan is a bit below 6 millions JPY.
Source: I have lived in Japan for 7 years total, have been managing multiple software engineer teams and done the hiring in multiple roles.
Big cloud companies are also in a very good position to afford these salaries, mostly because their revenue structure allows for that. The same is not true for many other software companies or non software companies that also need software engineers.
Silicon Valley salaries are heavily inflated by a few big players and VC money. It doesn't help that we engineers get arrogant and think California salary is the bar for other companies. It's simply not affordable for many companies and the importance of one engineer does also not warrant the salary. Do you think a single software engineer is more important than a mechanical engineer, so he can demand a x multiplier in compensation from the same company? In a cloud scenario like Google maybe, but what if you write software for a car?
Factor in the Japanese attitude of "group harmony" and you get a system, where rockstars/10x/whatever get average salaries. Then your 150m is a pretty damn good offer at 150% increase of average starting salary for 10 years experience.
There are also differently impactful software engineering positions. The most common crud backend engineer and frontend "ui implementer" don't warrant the salaries Google and co is paying for them (though from what I heard from Google employees, Google hires a lot of talent for positions that don't need that talent). Sure there are very impactful positions, e.g. in tooling and infrastructure that can safe everyone else in the company hours of time. But what's the ratio to the engineers for day to day business? 1:5? Lower? Even higher?
It is not unreasonable at all. If you have 15+ years experience in domains in demand, 15-20 millions total is totally achievable, even staying in the Japanese companies. What is true is that many companies screw software engineers over, but if you are in Tokyo , reasonably good at your job w/ skills in demand, you can and should avoid those terribe companies.
Comeon dude, don't settle for 10M JPY if you have enough technical competence to follow HackerNews
Go work in Silicon Valley for two years at 35M JPY/year, then come back to Japan and spend 8 years making games (or just playing them!)
Japan's software industry is toast, no point in investing even one second of your valuable time trying to prop it up. Even their home-grown businesses that fully understand all the intricacies of the local market are barely holding their own against the tendrils of US-based competitors, and they're never going to get any traction outside of Japan.
It's a different way of looking at things. I value raising my kids in a place where mass shootings in schools don't happen, and people walk on clean streets, as opposed to walking on trash and litter wondering if someone is going to mug you at any time. Or needing to buy, maintain, insure, drive a car, when you could take a clean safe comfortable train anywhere at any time.
The same reason why I wouldn't take a salary ten times better to live in the U.S. is why I also won't take a salary three times better in Japan that would force me into being married to my laptop and an abusive boss, as opposed to being married to my wife and working from home with much more modest earnings.
We have seen too many friends and relatives try what you suggest.
They work like crazy bastards for 20 or 30 years thinking of retiring with a massive fund, paying well for kids' education, getting a nice house, etc. They end up with mental illness, family who have never spent any time with them, sick from constant abuse, exhaustion, and overwork. If they don't kill themselves in the way. We call it karoshi.
Also, SONY for one ( there are others ) might disagree with your assessment, even in the relatively low place where they're at now.
I am with fiblye in that I believe you have vastly overestimated the costs of living in Japan and therefore the relative benefit of a higher salary in the US.
I am on my own ( which is not easy in Japan ) but many of my closest friends are manager-level engineers in big companies ( NTT, etc ) and rarely earn more than 5-7 million yen a year. This is with teams of dozens of people under them for which they are responsible. Reading your post is quite shocking for me.
Are you sure your friends disclose their actual salary? Or might they be underselling themselves to meet expectations and not disturb 和 (Wa)? Would be a very Japanese thing to do, wouldn't it?
It would, which is why I wrote "closest". Normally we do not discuss salaries. My wife was in charge of hiring in a big company as well and we're aware of where things are. But then, we're "average" people. As another comment points out, 6 million is the average salary, with which I agree. I do not agree 6-7 is not a good salary in Tokyo, as others also have said, 7 is pretty good money. Average of 6 means lots, and that's lots, of people earning less.
I don't know about NTT, but 5-6 millions JPY for manager-level roles in general is terrible, even outside Tokyo. W/ decent engineering skills, you should be able to get at least the double after enough experience in Tokyo.
If you want to check your market value, you may want to talk to a recruiter (a quite scammy business in Japan, but a good way to check your market value).
You seem to be in a higher 'middle-class' level than us. We don't see these numbers you mention. My wife was a recruiter for a few years herself.
Edit : And those 5-7 millions I mentioned often come with 10-to-14-hour workdays, by the way, plus Saturday on the laptop all day connected to work. I really wish reality was as you describe it. It is one of the reasons I'm freelance. I don't have the stamina for corporate Japan.
I am aware of the dread of the corporate life in large Japanese companies, and that many pay really badly. The numbers I have quoted are from people who worked in well known Japanese companies (Canon, Nintendo, etc.) and non Japanese (Pivotal).
Don't forget that in Japan there's not just the salary you have to account for. Many domestic companies pay for your accommodation (with it something worth at least 1.5 Million a year in most places), plus several other perks (rebates on certain services, additional medical insurance, etc...). So just looking at the salary does not tell the whole story.
While I know that to be so, none of my friends or relatives live or have lived in company housing. It's something we see in dramas, basically. NTT has provided first rate health care that you couldn't equal no matter what you paid for it on your own, though.
They should recruit from places other than the US. Engineers with as much ability and experience as you can be hired for far less from other Western nations.
I tried to politely explain how and why people like me command the kind of salaries we do in the USA, but they just didn't get it. At 15M JPY I'd rather just work in the USA for a year, then take a year off in Japan, so that's what I ended up doing, haha.
All the local Japanese software giants are slowly being strangled to death on their home turf, and they're completely failing to compete internationally. It's a real shame, but oh well!