This is very interesting. So a person can raise a larger family on an engineer’s salary and be happy in Japan? An American expat.
I wonder if this acts as a somewhat hidden subsidy to life whereas for people in many Western countries it is normal to think "there is no way I am living in area X/Y/Z" due to security concerns for them or their families, in Japan you basically don't need to take that into consideration at all. Everywhere is pretty safe (relatively speaking).
This is all speculation and I don't live in Japan, don't speak Japanese, and have never even been to Japan. So it is all based on reading other's views/articles etc.
Even if I am completely wrong here, it is interesting to consider the economic costs of lack of personal security for men and especially women. All the extra costs paid, opportunities missed etc.
There are no "good" or "bad" areas, only "rich" and "poor". If you're a student/minimum-wage worker who can only afford to live in certain areas, you're not forced to deal with the crime/drugs/general shitheads you usually encounter in the "bad" areas in the West.
> This is all speculation and I don't live in Japan, don't speak Japanese, and have never even been to Japan.
So what did you base this speculation on?
As a foreigner living in Japan, I can confirm this is true. Much of japanese society benefits from this homogeneity. Hard to quantify a lot of these benefits and even harder to compare Japan to somehwere as big and varied as the US, but there is certainly grease in the wheels of society as long as you are the average case in japan.
That said extremely homogeneous society is a double edged sword. Personal computing never took off in Japan as much as it did in the US, and the youth here are extremely disadvantaged because of it -- they're proficient with smart phones (roughly around 2010/2011 they gained mass adoption/cleared the popularity/acceptance hurdle) but it absolutely does not feel like there is enough proficiency being built in japan for success in the increasingly digital present and future.
[EDIT] - the proficiency I mean in the last bit is "real" computing -- i.e. using computers to create content, programs, and other useful things, rather than simply consuming it. I'm likely blinded by my own biases, but I see the ability to use photoshop/gimp, after effects, IDEs, terminals as abilities that award more leverage than being really good at using tiktok (which can indeed make engaging content) or drawing apps on iphone/etc.
I assume Canada doesn't primarily use local property taxes to pay for schools. This whole better schools thing is in higher income areas is a self imposed problem in the US.
Are you sure about that? A lot of real-estate listings I see here boast about having good schools.
Just think Silicon Valley.
For instance low elevation areas are usually weak to tsunami, river areas can also flood, and former swamp and artificial terrain can liquify under seisms. There are hazard maps detailing the risks, and avoiding riskier areas will usually cost a bunch.
Buildings also get more expensive depending on their level of resistance against earthquakes.
Sizeable seisms are not that rare (way more than “once in a lifetime” kind of event), so you might still be spending a decent amount of money to try to have a better chance at surviving them.
There's definitely huge variation in quality of areas in Tokyo (more or less parks, more or less access to services etc). Less so now, but many areas had a good amount of crime too! Loads of people don't want to live in areas cuz of the "bad vibes". People get stuff stolen here too! And there's a "good school"/"bad school" thing for certain areas.
But there's a baseline that is still something you can survive with. So yeah maybe you have a shitty environment but it's not "the entire bottom has fallen out" like chunks of the US. The schools have (some) money, and (relatively) clean water comes out of the pipes. And if you make very little money there is some semi-public housing that can fit a family of four.
And poorer families are given cash, not food stamps with 1000 exceptions to them.
All this sociological exoticism (mainly from Americans) is really missing the forest for the trees. A lot of it is the result of giving people some means to survive, even in difficult times. The US would change a lot if it could adopt that attitude.
I's recommend you try doing some back of the envelope logic/math here. I think you'll find the personal security effect negligible (unless you're comparing with south africa).
Even to someome like me who leans towards "race realism" (e.g. racism) this sounds like nonsense and dogwhistling.
There's a very real truth to japan's generally law abiding culture and it's the double edged sword of homogeneity. "good area"s didn't signify anything about race/culture difference to me (I wasn't even thinking of foreigners/non) in the negative, but more about how the basic "shared programming" of japanese culture is generally tilted away from crime/disobedience/singular action and towards law abidance/obedience/group action. If you take a look at how certain systems are set up (online security, in person security, how paperwork is done, etc), it can only exist in a country with very tight cohesion which comes from very tightly held shared values (or at least the appearance of that), whether that's a good or bad thing.
I didn't see that the commenter was implying that the heterogeneous portion was responsible for all the crime, but just that the dominant culture was on average more lawful than another might be, and that since that culture was so concentrated crime in general was lower than you might find in other places -- reducing the need to worry for everyone who lived there.
That said, Japan definitely has that kind of insidious/hard-to-demarcate racism/classism/etc. Japan as I've experienced it is just really good at 'other'-ing groups of people in some way or another and you could see it as a product of the culture, their historically generally xenophobic nature (also culture, I guess), or some other things.
Hidden subsidy? It's not a subsidy. Americans self impose an additional burden on themselves. They want their homes to be expensive because they don't want undesirable people to live near them.
This is common mostry in the anglosphere. In many other countries there is no such difference.
Japanese companies also give pay bumps eventually of course, and are very loathe to fire (worker rights are strong in japan), with an engineer's salary of "only" 100k (which honestly was being paid to interns at FAANG 10 years ago) you could raise multiple families here.
There is something called a "super salaryman" which is for salarymen who make ~$100k (1 million yen IIRC). Achieving this status is recognizable and makes a lot of things (getting loans, etc) easier -- that should say something about the mindset.
It's still unclear if engineers in American are ridiculously overpaid, or if engineers in Japan and the EU are ridiculously underpaid. I lean towards the latter.
[EDIT] - forgot something, it used to be common practice in Japan to pay people according to life circumstances (getting married, children, etc) or other things (lots of info here[0] though it doesn't directly cover this was something I learned studying in Japan in some undergrad Japanese management course). It would be naive to think people aren't paid slightly differently because of their life situation here though -- it's very easy to rationalize paying someone more because they have more "responsibility" at home/in society, and maybe arguably even morally correct.
[0]: https://www.ilo.org/ifpdial/information-resources/national-l...
why do you only compare to Japan and EU? American engineers get paid more than anyone else (except for EU outliers). I make slightly above 100k in Australia, it's a bit tight with the housing situation and cost of living but it's liveable. Cost of living in the US is lower except for maybe healthcare but engineers get companies pay for them anyway.
I don't have insights into other engineering, but I think software engineers are overpaid. Would I enjoy being overpaid? Of course, but it's hard to say it's fair pay considering what people in other professions are making.
Well those are just the biggest/most relevant tech labor markets I could think of, roughly by GDP. I don't know much about Australia but couldn't comment there, thanks for the insight.
> I don't have insights into other engineering, but I think software engineers are overpaid. Would I enjoy being overpaid? Of course, but it's hard to say it's fair pay considering what people in other professions are making.
I don't think comparing pay across professions makes sense -- why compare a plumber or doctor to what a software engineer does? the outcomes are completely different, the risks are completely different, the upside/profit potential is completely different.
I lean towards considering software engineers as underpaid because the power of automation (whether software or hardware -- because you generally need some kind of soft/firmware to make robots move) is insane. If software engineers were ever paid a percentage of the revenue impact they generate (which is not how markets work, but I digress), software engineers would be paid much much more. I think it might be possible to compare across professions if you think of % of value creation captured let's say but it gets tenuous.
In the end the only "fair" determination is what supply and demand based markets dictate. They're not perfect, but they approximate other forces/influences decently enough. When those aren't enough, governments may need to step in to enact policy.
> you generally need some kind of soft/firmware to make robots move) is insane
The fact that you completely ignore the hardware is very telling. CPU has been improved according to Moore's law in the past few decades, if anything modern software engineering failed to live up to that potential and has been free riding on top of progress in hardware.
It's insane to make robots move but software is a small part of that, there is also mechanical/electrical engineering, battery techs etc. Software sitting at the top of that stack shouldn't takes all the credit. It's very hard to innovate on the lower layers with all the lab work and physical constrains.
Hmnn but doing it that way feels like it would devalue doing things smarter which seems to be more beneficial to society. Single-mindedly incentivizing labor seems like it would skewer efficiency -- I guess like most things the right answer is in the middle.
I'm not sure what you mean by "viral" things but I'm trying to discuss only about work output. If the work output is virality (let's say a social media manager), then it makes sense to measure that way, but usually businesses don't deal in that currency -- they deal in product shipped out or contracts landed, etc. That said, I'm well aware that systems that think themselves to be closest to the capitalist ideal are pretty brutal on the cogs in the machine.
As a side note, it's a red flag for me when I see github projects that are too concerned with stars/going viral, or even when I see presentations about projects that mention stars. Everyone thinks it's silly but everyone keeps doing it -- if only we'd stop then people would start judging projects on things other than adoption. Then again, adoption is the biggest metric for most people, because it generally is a proxy for "availability of free support/feature development", and in that sense I'm guilty of the same.
> The fact that you completely ignore the hardware is very telling. CPU has been improved according to Moore's law in the past few decades, if anything modern software engineering failed to live up to that potential and has been free riding on top of progress in hardware.
> It's insane to make robots move but software is a small part of that, there is also mechanical/electrical engineering, battery techs etc. Software sitting at the top of that stack shouldn't takes all the credit. It's very hard to innovate on the lower layers with all the lab work and physical constrains.
Agreed! There is more than enough value to go around to be shared between all those kinds of engineering -- just because I didn't mention lithography engineers or materials science engineers or people who smelt silicon doesn't mean they don't exist and don't deserve to be paid.
I read history books, I'm not that stupid.
The reason I bring this up is a couple of comments up you said software creates tremendous value, I guess this is true for many other types of innovations too. You proceeded to say software developers need to be paid proportionate to that value and I disagree there.
If we look at salary as incentive I would say that software engineers get enough incentive to do our job. As long as we get paid better than most other professions, society/the economy don't need to pay us more.
While pay should not be based on labour, it should be capped, probably based on the labour. Otherwise every cog in the machine earns some royalty (infinitely, if the machine scales infinitely) and there is no money left for "non-machine".
The bad thing in this industry is work/life balance, we just need to fix that. Although the pay in some countries are atrocious, I'd say that software engineers in most western countries are fine.
Didn't imply you were! I am assuming the best as people do here on HN.
> The reason I bring this up is a couple of comments up you said software creates tremendous value, I guess this is true for many other types of innovations too. You proceeded to say software developers need to be paid proportionate to that value and I disagree there.
> If we look at salary as incentive I would say that software engineers get enough incentive to do our job. As long as we get paid better than most other professions, society/the economy don't need to pay us more.
> While pay should not be based on labour, it should be capped, probably based on the labour. Otherwise every cog in the machine earns some royalty (infinitely, if the machine scales infinitely) and there is no money left for "non-machine".
So I still disagree with this point, but I want to point out that I am in favor of the idea that every cog in the machine earns a royalty on every piece of the process. I believe both machine and non-machine could win in that situation. If you have a new idea (and the funding to go after it, etc) then you get to decide the cap table essentially -- so it's up to you to set rates on the royalties and up to labor to agree/deny. How you'd work out royalties in relation to work done/etc is difficult, but it's something that feels like it can be worked out. Pensions used to be a thing, and they're kind of like that.
> The bad thing in this industry is work/life balance, we just need to fix that. Although the pay in some countries are atrocious, I'd say that software engineers in most western countries are fine.
Weird, I think that work/life balance for software is actually really good -- you're not going to find much work/life balance (or companies that even pretend to care about that) in the blue collar job market. The ability to up and move with transferable skills is really remarkable in tech as well... In short I agree with you that tech has it good, but I don't think it makes sense to restrict that "good" based on the "bad" of other fields -- we don't need to be equal. If workers are getting exploited outside of tech, let's make them less exploited and get them what they're worth -- if tech workers are exploited let's get them what they're worth.
The question of how to determine that worth is the big difference we're at loggerheads about I think, and I don't think it makes sense to judge by amount of "work" done. That very idea is rooted in some sort of moralistic argument that work/expenditure is good/virtuous/worth being paid for, and I don't think that's a shared value. Labor is given meaning by the fruit it produces, and that's how I'm trying to judge the value of labor -- the value it produces (whether immediately or down the line) -- royalties do that rather well compared to our current system.
According to what metric? I suspect most of the stellar SV salaries come from the economic model.
I disagree. The value created is going to be accreted somewhere, and I would prefer that somewhere be the labor that created it rather than the capital funded the creation.
Look at how much some YouTubers make. Due to the Internet, they can reach far more people than before and make far more money. Also, their popularity begat more popularity without commensurate additional work on their part.
The same is happening to tech companies. You have that same power law with a few at the top making a lot of the money. It applies to YouTubers, tech companies, software engineers at those tech companies, etc... The rise of tech billionaires is another manifestation of this.
Of course this is creating a lot of pushback from other parts of society that are sometimes actually losing influence, money, etc... since there is a negative feedback loop on the other side.
You can work very hard (dig useless ditches with shovels) or on very tricky things (write about things nobody cares about, nobody understands and do not matter) and not make things of much value. A society that does that in aggregate is a society that either dies or falls behind.
0: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companies-cutting-salar...
1: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/ (12% YoY for two years is scary).
House expensive -> salaries jump -> people have more money to pay for house -> house becomes more expensive.
This is like arguing about the chicken or the egg. More housing supply would help to a point but it would take an order of magnitude change to make a dent in the current self-reinforcing cycle, and probably would need that level of increased production for a period of time.
0. California existed
1. Government investment comes to the valley during the cold war in early SV companies
2. Innovation happens in leaps and bounds thanks to the government checkbook
3. Profit is made hand over fist by some people/groups/entities
4. People/groups/entities from (3) buy more of everything
5. More People & entities come in search of interesting ideas/cutting edge technology/profit/fame/etc
6. return to (3)
Stanford was founded by Leland Stanford, the robber baron who owned the Central Pacific, which built the transcontinental railroad. This has more or less been the cycle since the Gold Rush.
The maximum possible salary doesn't change because of more expensive housing, only your ability to negotiate for a salary rise does. Therefore expensive housing will let you get the maximum possible salary at most.
There is a self reinforcing cycle but it has nothing to do with housing. You're saying that expensive housing is the only factor in salaries which is completely wrong.
The self reinforcing cycle is that developer salaries rise in Silicon Valley, people start moving there, which kicks out existing residents. You can enact rent control and rent prices will stay the same but you still end up kicking people out because nobody is building anything. The reason why it is self reinforcing is that developers living in close proximity results in agglomeration effects, each additional developer makes every other developer more productive.
I've never claimed that rent control works. But house prices would not keep rising if no one had the salary to afford the mortgage. People still do, they're just all concentrated in the one profession, and due to bumper results they can demand more.
You probably couldn't negotiate SV level salaries in, say, Tulsa, and pretty much every large company I have heard of expanding remote work is doing so with geographically adjusted pay downwards from SV. (I never really got the angle of people who thought they would get to have their cake and eat it too with SV-level salary and dirt-cheap COL; employers aren't blind.)
Anyway at the senior levels the pay is even more stupid high in SV, way more than anything you'd need to live on. How high do salaries go in Australia?
Some outliers are Optiver (a prop trading firm) paying 160k (half of which is bonus) and Google paying (up to I heard) 125k to grads. However the number of companies like that in Australia you could count on one hand (Amazon, Atlassian, Canva), so there is nothing to drive average salary up like in SV.
RSU is way less common. There are also cases of double standards such as companies founded in Australia expanding to the US offers way better perks and RSU to US staff but stop offering RSU to new Australian hires.
100k USD (So ~130k AUD)? Even if that's 100k AUD, it's a bit odd to hear that it's "tight" when you're on 100k. I didn't think Aussie's COL was that high.
COL is higher than most countries in the world. It being a remote continent, that should not come as a surprise. Average house price in Melbourne is now AUD 1m or USD 775k
I'm curious why you would think this. In some ways software is a trade, but what makes it unique to nearly any other profession is its multiplicative effect. One software engineer can write a program that improves the productivity of thousands or more people.
What would you pay the person who invented the lever? Now, what you would the pay the person who invents the lever every couple weeks?
If anything, many software engineers are still underpaid.
There are indeed developers working on useful things to society, but they usually work on top of amazing intercom and hardware infrastructures that drive more innovation and deserve more credit than their crappy software.
Speaking as a web developer.
The "multiplicative effect" is easy to translate to economic factors: it's what allows software-based companies to have very high marginal profit. The average net profit margin of a small business in the US is less than 10%, but in scaled, software-centered businesses it's not unusual to be above 30% or 50% due to the zero marginal cost of production.
But for every company like Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Google etc which understand this and plays to it to shoot for sky-high unit margins, there are N companies like Tata Consultancy, Accenture, Capgemini (or in-house IT departments) which effectively employ software engineers to do non-reusable "glue" tasks where the margin expectation is topping out somewhere between around 10%. These folks cannot pay as much for talent, in part because their stock isn't valued nearly as much, whereas it is a relatively cheap source of compensation for tech companies.
A key to understanding the difference between US and other markets is the 1:N ratio. Software engineers in the Bay Area are gifted with very low ratios, and places where the ratio is higher in my experience have much more depressed software engineering compensation because there are not enough high margin software businesses to drive them.
The market is subject to market failure, manipulation, boom and bust cycles, depressions, can be undervalued, overvalued, etc.
You're right about paying people differently based on life circumstances - but this generally happens in the form of substantial tax cuts for couples with a non/part time working wife (e.g. [2]), rather than by paying them more (although there are some government benefits like a child allowance).
Mostly nitpicking here! Appreciate your contributions to this thread, you're right on the money for the most part
[1]: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00759/ [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-JRTB-17152