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Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

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Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#51

Post by VRay »

dmix wrote: post #47
ekianjo wrote: post #31

Recruit is one of the worst domestic companies in Japan. Their services suck, they are badly designed, they are not integrated, they have way too much workforce for the kind of business they are in, I could go on and on. If that's the best that Japan has to offer then the rest of the world is safe.

Man it's so depressing looking at what a giant Japan could be in the tech industry if they got their shit together politically, economically, and culturally to bring entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking back. Their potential talent-to-output ratio has to be one of the worst in the world. Probably the worst if you look at their flashes on brilliance in the 1980s and early 1990s and what they could be today. This…

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!

Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#53

Post by GolDDranks »

VRay wrote: post #51
dmix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man it's so depressing looking at what a giant Japan could be in the tech industry if they got their shit together politically, economically, and culturally to bring entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking back. Their potential talent-to-output ratio has to be one of the worst in the world. Probably the worst if you look at their flashes on brilliance in the 1980s and early 1990s and what they could be today. This…

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…

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.

Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#54

Post by rurounijones »

VRay wrote: post #51
dmix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man it's so depressing looking at what a giant Japan could be in the tech industry if they got their shit together politically, economically, and culturally to bring entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking back. Their potential talent-to-output ratio has to be one of the worst in the world. Probably the worst if you look at their flashes on brilliance in the 1980s and early 1990s and what they could be today. This…

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…

15 million JPY/year is a huge salary in Japan, even in Tokyo.

I think your salary expectations have been skewed by your employment history.

Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#55

Post by MHordecki »

GolDDranks wrote: post #53
VRay wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#56

Post by ascar »

VRay wrote: post #51
dmix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man it's so depressing looking at what a giant Japan could be in the tech industry if they got their shit together politically, economically, and culturally to bring entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking back. Their potential talent-to-output ratio has to be one of the worst in the world. Probably the worst if you look at their flashes on brilliance in the 1980s and early 1990s and what they could be today. This…

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…

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?

Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#57

Post by Ultramanoid »

VRay wrote: post #51
dmix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man it's so depressing looking at what a giant Japan could be in the tech industry if they got their shit together politically, economically, and culturally to bring entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking back. Their potential talent-to-output ratio has to be one of the worst in the world. Probably the worst if you look at their flashes on brilliance in the 1980s and early 1990s and what they could be today. This…

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…

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.

Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#58

Post by Ultramanoid »

rurounijones wrote: post #54
VRay wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

15 million JPY/year is a huge salary in Japan, even in Tokyo. I think your salary expectations have been skewed by your employment history.

Indeed it is. I could take quite a few years off with a yearly salary like that, as you say, even in Tokyo.

Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#59

Post by EliRivers »

VRay wrote: post #51
dmix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man it's so depressing looking at what a giant Japan could be in the tech industry if they got their shit together politically, economically, and culturally to bring entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking back. Their potential talent-to-output ratio has to be one of the worst in the world. Probably the worst if you look at their flashes on brilliance in the 1980s and early 1990s and what they could be today. This…

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…

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.

Re: Recruit Is Japan’s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination

#60

Post by Ultramanoid »

GolDDranks wrote: post #53
VRay wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.
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