"Dangling salaries of 10 million yen", or about $91k. The fact that this is considered unusually high tells you all you need to know about engineering salaries in Japan. (And yes, IT salaries are in the same ballpark.)
Copenhagen (my former home turf) used to be not great, basically software engineering was/is considered low status and all the smart devs in corporations were steered to higher status, but less technical, roles like architect, consulting or project management (or other middle management). Denmark really bought into the idea that we're the ideas people, the grunt work can be done in India or Poland or whatever. Some successful software startups came out of there, like Endomondo, Vivino and Zendesk, but they moved their centre of gravity to the bay area at first opportunity. This has since changed, and from what I've heard there's a fairly happening startup scene there now (still an awful place to be a corporate dev, though).
Curious if you have any insights on where do they end up going instead, even if anecdotal. (E.g.: smaller firms, own startups, or foreign (US/China) opportunities?)
My SO and I have seriously discussed moving to Tokyo when it comes time to raise a family. We're both pretty disappointed with the culture here in the US that makes it difficult to let your kids be independent and self reliant (See: Parents getting their kids taken away for letting them walk to the park, etc), and we've loved the time we've spent in Tokyo.
The salary situation makes this pretty tough, though.
That said, blockchain jobs in Japan are supposed to be abundant and pay more like US wages.
Unless it's Cannabis.
But alcohol, cigarettes and Coca Cola are less available if you live on a rural farm.
It was sold to a U.S. company, and everything about management and corporate culture has gotten worse. People are less happy and feel they have less job security, which translates into poorer performance and reduced commitment. Japanese companies have their issues, but a lot of Americans have much to learn from them about making employees want to stay.
Salaries are fair and correspond to the cost of living.
What kind of a job did your colleague apply for at Microsoft? They don't do much development work in Tokyo.
What hardware realm? They're involved all over.
Right now they're absolutely crushing the camera market - the A73 and AR73 are taking the world by storm, with tons of Canon and Nikon DSLR converts (Including myself). Their GM lenses are the sharpest available at a lot of focal lengths, the bokeh is close to the top of readily available modern lenses, etc. They're certainly competing there.
Their UHS-II cards are some of the fastest on the market.
The PS4 is the leader in lifetime sales vs. other consoles.
What hardware are you talking about?
Sony's camera division makes money from selling camera parts to other companies - including Apple.
Then the iPhone came out and just being a phone wasn't good enough.
Now everyone else uses Sony's sensor anyway so what is their advantage? Lenses?
Maybe not the first, damned close.
My comment does not refer to the gaming and photography divisions, as those are cash cows for Sony.
That said, they seem to do way less marketing than Samsung or Apple.
Even so, they have carved out a niche of making smaller Android phones (their Compact variants) that share internals with their larger brethren.
You're off by a factor of two. The PS4 has been out for 4.5 years, not "8 years or so".
> It may outsell the PS4 right now, though.
In FY2017 the PS4 sold 19 million units. The Switch sold 13 million (15.5M sold in total so far, but 2.7M were in FY2016).
On the dev side. I’ve been told that there are a few main consultancy firms which do the bulk of development for most companies. It’s more appropriate to hire these firms than it is to build your own teams. Because these firms do not pay high amounts to their devs, it sets the norm across the country.
It is extraordinarily unlikely that employee is an engineer.
(For additional "It's complicated!" context: I believe his bosses likely considered the offer they made him to be a plum. My ex-employer had a similar terminal outcome for distinguished engineers, where you'd be given a laboratory, perhaps an assistant or two, and total freedom. Is that a particularly compelling terminal offer? No. But it's an offer better than 99.8% of employees in the engineering track have. The mere fact that it is obviously better than what 99.8% of engineers get is a component of the offer; Japanese megacorps figure out that giving you money to purchase status is inefficient when they can simply award you status directly.)
Apartments in Japan tend to be small and having lived in various places in the world, I'm going to say that it is not really comparable. For example, no matter what you rent, you are going to get a stupidly small kitchen: probably a single sink, 0.5 meter counter top and a place to put a konro (2 burner gas range with a fish grill).
Apart from the kitchen (which takes a lot of practice to get used to), the bath room/wash rooms tend to make very efficient use of space. If you are living in Japanese style, you also put your futons away in the closet during the day and can live in what would be your bedroom.
I live in a rural area and since I work remotely, I wanted an office in the apartment. We tried to get a 3 bedroom apartment (so we would have a guest room as well), but it was just impossible. Nobody could even understand why a childless couple could possibly use that much space.
So it's more a matter of culture than price. In large centres you actually have a lot more choice. For example when I visit Tokyo, I often see advertisements for 4 bedroom luxury apartments. They are about the same price as you would pay in any other metropolitan centre in the world. However, things like that just aren't available in a lot of smaller places. You pretty much have to buy a house.