Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are off by an order of magnitude, 1 million yen is ~9k USD. That's a ridiculously low salary here, fine for a college kid with a part time job ("arubaito") at your local konbini, but not much else. Maybe you got confused because China, Japan and Korea group numbers by powers of 10 000 ("man")? Now a 1000-man (10 million yen, around 90k USD or 75k EUR) salary would be amazing, the average Japanese salary is 3 mill…
> a college kid with a part time job ("arubaito") at your local konbini Is the japanese word for a part-time job really the german word 'Arbeit'? Amusing.
CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
161–170 of 266 posts
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate?
I am not OP but I have noticed in several European countries that many companies see software engineering (and IT in general) as a "necessary evil". Even in SMEs selling automation solutions, the perception is that the "real" work is done by the mechanical/electrical engineers and the marketing department, while the software engineers are just...support people, aren't they? And everybody has learned a little bit of p…
I think this is common in the rest of the US/EU as well. The difference between how "tech" companies treat software engineers is very different from how "normal" companies treat software. Tech companies "get" that the difference between good and bad software is enormous and that it's worth doing the work to get good people to build it, other companies usually don't.
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#163> Tange, 46, says his business model is an attempt to remove inefficiencies in Japan’s software industry, where layers of subcontractors take cuts on orders before passing the work to another company below. This reminds me of a role I once had back in the late nighties. I was hired on contract by a multi-national consultancy firm to help out on one of their projects. The need someone to come in with good C programmin…
Its same in Indian IT. When I joined Infosys straight out of university, my salary was approx `$350` per month. They told client, I have 2 years of experience as Informatica developer and charged $50 per hour. Before joining the project, I had never seen the Informatica tool.
How did you get to know what they told the client? Your bosses wanted you to know, so you didn't say the wrong things, if the client asked something? (eg so you knew to day yes if the client asked if you had two years experience)
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is still alive and well in eastern Europe - I worked for such companies. They would go a step further and lie that: -They can quickly expand that team of three mid-level developers to eleven, adding mostly seniors. -A team of junior to mid developers is comprised of seniors. -The team is working at FTE on this project and has no other responsibilities. Currently stakeholders often have to resort to requesting th…
> requesting the CVs of all the people involved Can't the agency provide made up nice looking CV:s? > client is billed $100+/h That's interesting, then seems it's not much different from hiring a local person (in western Europe). > A team of junior to mid developers is comprised of seniors I suppose the clients usually won't notice? They're often non technical (or at least the managers there?) and don't know what to…
There's a line between 'misleading' and 'actual fraud' that these service providers like to stay on the right side of (but very close to). Producing made up CVs is the sort of thing that would make it a very short court case if they got caught.
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is still alive and well in eastern Europe - I worked for such companies. They would go a step further and lie that: -They can quickly expand that team of three mid-level developers to eleven, adding mostly seniors. -A team of junior to mid developers is comprised of seniors. -The team is working at FTE on this project and has no other responsibilities. Currently stakeholders often have to resort to requesting th…
> requesting the CVs of all the people involved Can't the agency provide made up nice looking CV:s? > client is billed $100+/h That's interesting, then seems it's not much different from hiring a local person (in western Europe). > A team of junior to mid developers is comprised of seniors I suppose the clients usually won't notice? They're often non technical (or at least the managers there?) and don't know what to…
> Can't the agency provide made up nice looking CV:s?
Yes! But this is countered by a 30min call with the candidate.
Regarding billing: this is how much SV companies are charged. At the same time they're the ones who fall victim to such practices the most often.
For everyone else the average rate is around $45-55/h and you get what you pay for.
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> requesting the CVs of all the people involved Can't the agency provide made up nice looking CV:s? > client is billed $100+/h That's interesting, then seems it's not much different from hiring a local person (in western Europe). > A team of junior to mid developers is comprised of seniors I suppose the clients usually won't notice? They're often non technical (or at least the managers there?) and don't know what to…
There's a line between 'misleading' and 'actual fraud' that these service providers like to stay on the right side of (but very close to). Producing made up CVs is the sort of thing that would make it a very short court case if they got caught.
Actual conversation I had a few years ago:
-Client requires . Can you add it to your CV?
-I don't know, can I?
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate?
I am not OP but I have noticed in several European countries that many companies see software engineering (and IT in general) as a "necessary evil". Even in SMEs selling automation solutions, the perception is that the "real" work is done by the mechanical/electrical engineers and the marketing department, while the software engineers are just...support people, aren't they? And everybody has learned a little bit of p…
More specifically: I'm also a cross-professional, having obtained a degree in Electronic Engineering and learned software engineering out of personal interest (obviously with significant knowledge gaps.) Yet, I still notice I'm patronizingly put down by "the grown ups" in management that cultivate an obvious disdain for the "techies" and "engineers" (as in "the steam engine operator shoveling coal into the furnace"), despising their poor intellectual and professional quality, while at the same time trying to price them out with all means possible.
whatever...
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#168> Tange, 46, says his business model is an attempt to remove inefficiencies in Japan’s software industry, where layers of subcontractors take cuts on orders before passing the work to another company below. This reminds me of a role I once had back in the late nighties. I was hired on contract by a multi-national consultancy firm to help out on one of their projects. The need someone to come in with good C programmin…
This is basically the bread and butter of large parts of the consulting industry in Norway as well, although not quite as dysfunctional. Always be recruiting promising young engineers from university, pay them graduate salaries and bill them out at senior rates. Keep enough experienced engineers around to mentor them and ensure that the delivered product is good. Profit margin for each of these developers is excellent.
When they get enough confidence and experience to realize they're underpaid, they'll jump ship to a company that pays senior-level salary (but still bills at very similar rates!), or to a consulting firm that mostly pays commission.
Don't quite agree with myself whether this is an example of a gross inefficiency or just the logical way to train people.
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#169Looking around the internet, it seems Shift Inc. is paying around 4.5-5.0 (full range: 3.8-7.8) million JPY / year total comp.
This is about 40k-45k USD/year. It's somewhat better than what engineers would get on a black companies and local consulting companies and perhaps on par with some of the traditional blue chip companies.
But this doesn't come anywhere close to what a software engineer can earn on the highest paying companies here, like Google or Indeed (levels.fyi pegs Google L4 as earning 14-23 million JPY per year, though the dataset is a little bit small).
Even the large local IT-focused companies are competing for talent: Yahoo, Line, Rakuten, Works Applications, Mercari etc. will all pay up to 11m-13m for non-manager software engineers (even though they won't necessarily pay much higher for entry-level engineers). Many well-funded startups are also paying 7m-10m salaries to their engineers.
The pay gaps between different companies in the very same city (Tokyo) for the same position can be quite high. You can read more about it here: https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-ja...
In short, if Shift Inc. is paying around 5m for their engineers, it might help them fight high turnover, but it won't be enough to bring the best engineers. There are companies which are both more well-known and stable and are still paying higher salaries.
Re: CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
This explains a lot of my experience with our offshore engineers. Glad to see I’m not crazy.
In my experience it's the same with western/American consultancies.
Yeah, similar story from Western Europe - graduate consultancy gave me 3 months of Java programming material to essentially self-teach myself straight out of university with 0 programming experience. 3 months later I was starting a C# role at a bulge bracket investment bank where the team was expecting someone with at least some exp. seeing as I was costing 75kpa to them (I received 20k as salary).
Only reason I didn't get sent back the first week was my boss taking a liking to me, same story for the other 30/40 'consultants' starting at the same bank at the same time.
Worse part was the precondition to accepting the graduate consultancy role was a 20k bond that I would have had to pay if I wanted to leave within 2 years of my first contract. While without them I wouldn't have ended up where I am today, at the same time they earned absolutely zero good will from me due to the terrible wage/cost ratio they gave me and the complete lack of any training while I had to take personal responsibility on the client site for my lack of experience.