Japan needs a lot more tech workers. Can it find a place for women?
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
In fact, convincing many women to commit to the field early in their educations for reasons of representation, rather than because the economics are compelling to them, would only make the situation worse: relatively more workers competing for jobs with salaries that are already low.
Japanese enterprises do not value software engineering talent and there are probably some underlying fundamentals behind that -- in workplaces with relatively low independence, it's hard to leverage engineering talent for much -- which, left unchanged, will make initiatives like this into a game of musical chairs.
[1] https://kimi.wiki/work/income ("IT, Communications")
[2] https://www.tsunagulocal.com/en/42243/ ("Informations services")
If you look at public data on somewhere like levels.fyi, there's a big gap in pay even within the same company, at the same level. I'm most familiar with Seattle comp, and same tier of SDE role is a 30+% paycut from Seattle to Tokyo at FAANG companies.
I also know someone who left a FAANG company here to go work in Japan for awhile. They had to move from SDE to Data Scientist + got a senior role at the new company, and even then they struggled to get anywhere close to their previous comp.
> Salaries and prestige are relatively low for *developers in Japan*, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and *draw them away from technology*.
I agree that difficulty attracting foreign talent is a problem for the Japanese tech industry, but I don't think it's the focus of the article or the focus of the parent comment.
These are not the kind of sources I would use to study these things, by the way, because they break things down by industry or profession rather than role and these sources use incredibly broad "industry" and "profession" categories.
Yeah, I was pretty surprised to hear that a Senior Engineering Manager at Rakuten, the "Japanese Amazon" and one of their top software companies, only has the TC of somewhere around $100k USD. And the position was in Tokyo, not exactly a cheap place.
Many senior engineers at "top tier" domestic software companies get paid somewhere around $70-$90k, which is pathetic for even LCOL areas in the U.S.
Software Engineers: ~145k Registered Nurses: ~140k
(note these are for SF and San Jose, not overall - the source for all this is at US News Best jobs which relies on labor dept data: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs).
I've left a version of this comment a bunch of times on HN over the years, but I'll add the usual provisos - I don't object to nurses making lots of money, or more than software engineers for that matter, but I will point out that SEs overall really aren't remarkably well paid compared to other educated professionals. And while SEs at the top make well above the median, so do many nurses in specialties that require a MS or higher.
I'm just not convinced that women would be well served by leaving nursing, law, finance, or medicine to go into tech. I don't mean this in a work-life balance "do you really want this" way. I mean, if women want to build substantial independent wealth, power, and influence, they may be well served by avoiding tech careers (or, if they work in tech, avoiding SE roles). Honestly, this is pretty much the same advice I'd give men. I'm hesitant to discourage anyone from tech or SE roles, since clearly people do have great careers in them, and it's the right choice for some people. What I resist is the notion that people should be choosing it more often than they do, when in fact, I think the low to medium level of interest in SE careers is probably the product outcome of smart people weighing the demands and rewards of a career relative to their personal professional and life interests.
I consider it very rational that US citizens with choice generally choose not to become developers in the valley in the numbers that Silicon Valley execs think they should. It's not a huge coincidence that the people who staff these positions disproportionately work on visas that limit their range of free choice in career path.
> How are "wages" defined by the OEWS survey?
> The following are excluded from the collection of OEWS wage data:
> Non-production bonuses
> Stock bonuses
> Year-end bonuses
Note that according to the BLS link you provided, overtime is also excluded. My company stock has never been worth a dime - I worked for Sun Microsystems before it crashed, and later for a startup that went kaput. This is all a combination of timing, luck, choices, the ability (or lack thereof) to pick a winner. Clearly variable pay is worth a lot at google, facebook, and many early startups, but my story is absolutely not unusual - and on the other side of the coin, I can assure you that nurses do get a tremendous amount of value out of overtime. Furthermore, overtime pay is predictable: you work more hours, you get 1.5-2x more money. But this pay is also excluded from the comparison I made above.
Without these considerations, the data is of limited value. FWIW, I have always been a little suspicious of how low the software engineer pay is on these surveys.
Overall, though, I think that in spite of the noise, the general principle does hold, that pay and benefits are good enough in other fields available that there's no reason to be puzzled about the low to medium interest level in being a developer in Silicon Valley, that this all explained as rational behavior in labor markets among hard working, academically inclined people.
In addition software engineering suffers from the worst ageism of any career which basically means that around mid to late 30s one starts to run into issues. Now contrast that with many other careers where one’s value invariably increases as one gains experience.
Given that, my general advice is even if you start with software engineering, transition out to other roles very quickly unless you’re in the top 1%, can be a founder or truly love software engineering.
The downside to this attrition is that software engineering (or development if you'd prefer to avoid a charged term) really does need experienced people who understand the long term impact of design, technical debt, what to pursue and what to abandon, mentor and develop new talent, and so forth.
I suspect "software engineer" encompasses people getting 400k at a FAANG and people earning 60k at an outsourcing consultancy or small product shop in a low cost-of-living area.
I'd be surprised if the spread for a RN is as broad.
The median salary for a nurse anesthetist in San Francisco is around $250k a year (and $285k a year in Akron OH)[1] - keep in mind, that's the median, not the top 10th or 25th percentile. Meanwhile, The median salary for a registered nurse nationally is $73k a year, and the 25%ile is $63k a year[2]
[1] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/nurse-anesthetist...
[2] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/registered-nurse/...
Also - remember (per the discussion above) that the 400k software engineer pay you mentioned almost certainly includes stock (which is not included in these numbers), but the pay for nurses doesn't include overtime. Try using the Transparent California calculator to see some of the higher end total compensation for nurses.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=nurse&y...
Don’t recall if they were in the Bay Area or not, but I know someone out in California who is a nurse and wants out because the shear amount of hours they make you work. I suppose many Bay Area engineers may work a lot of extra hours as well, but my understanding was that nursing pay looks much less appealing when you’re working double the standard work week.
Another aspect to this is that IT is one of the few fields where there is a low tradition lock. Getting into the more prestigious and high paying areas can require either a better diploma, stronger adhesion to stereotypical profiles, or working way longer inside to climb the ranks.
In comparison IT companies will be more focused on competence, accept lower social status in exchange for performance. I think this is true in other countries as well, but Japan looks to me like a poster child for this bias.
1) The birth rate in Japan has been below-replacement since 1974.
2) As a result, the population is shrinking.
3) Because the population is shrinking, there isn't enough workers.
Alright, I'm with you so far.
4) Therefore, more women need to get full-time jobs.
Uh... ?
I feel like I'm going nuts. Everywhere in the prestige media the solution presented is "women should just have a full-time job and raise 2.1 children at the same time". But does that actually exist anywhere?
I hear about paid child leave in the Nordic countries as a solution. But Sweden has a birth rate of 1.76, Denmark 1.73, Norway 1.56... and the curve isn't even trending up! Paid child leave and government childcare is great and cool, but as a solution to below-replacement fertility it clearly and obviously doesn't work, and for some reason nobody wants to say this.
The other answer is immigration, but the problem then is then you're competing with every other country in the world, and Japanese firms pay way, way, way below FAANG.
Transplanting a brain to save the body?
I'd like to think that the body would affect the brain in dramatic and transformative ways, but on the other hand the body might just establish a class system that eventually starves both systems.
"Send in the SCVs!"
"But where will we get our minerals from? How will we train more marines?"
"Send in the SCVs!"
...
I mean, it made sense as a short-term measure during WW2 to boost arms production. But you can't run a society this way long term. It's insane.
"Help us, we're starving!"
"Just eat more of your seed corn; trust me!"
...
It's like a society that never figured out crop rotation. Yeah, you can grow corn for a while, but you also need to rotate in some cover-crops and nitrogen-fixers. You need to let the soil rest and restore fertility. You can't have it pumping out economic output season after season.
Barring anything better, we're stuck with the null hypothesis: getting out a ruler and extending the trend line into the future.
If the population is growing, then eventually Japan would have billions of people where there are currently hundreds of millions. There was much speculation in the 50s on how you could deal with that scenario if it happened, but it's not looking very likely now.
If the population is exactly static, one person born for every death: not too bad. You could call it "stagnation" if you wanted to be negative.
If the population is declining: it will eventually hit zero, and the country will cease to exist. Japan's population declined by 1.8 million people between 2010 and 2019. If the decline is linear, (which it won't be, considering their age distribution) then that has them hitting zero in 2089! If you think that scenario won't happen, then please provide your reason. "That would be terrible, so it won't" isn't a reason.
The UN population projections show European and North American fertility rates leveling off and even increasing. That would be very good news, if true! Fortunately, they explain their reasoning: https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Hig...
>The fact that fertility preferences remain close to two children per woman, even as realized fertility has fallen well below that level, suggests that the fertility rate in low-fertility countries may increase as populations learn to manage and mitigate some or all impeding factors. The trend in many countries towards gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as expanded access to sexual and reproductive health care and services, also indicates that it may become possible for more women and couples in current low-fertility countries to achieve their desired family size, eventually raising the average fertility levels. Given that a growing number of countries is expressing a desire to increase the fertility rate and that some have achieved this outcome, supported by government policies and programmes, a rebound in the fertility trend in current low-fertility countries seems the most plausible future trajectory over the long run.
I am not seeing where this optimism is coming from. A graph of fertility rates for a basket of European countries shows a pronounced sub-replacement horizontal trend, with no sustained growth or decay. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location... This foretells a gentle decline, rather than the sharp crash that's apparently in the cards for China, Japan and South Korea; but provides absolutely no evidence that more "reproductive health services" will rescue us.
The only way I could see this changing if men would take on much more of the caregiving role. But that is not currently happening.
This problem is easily solvable with increased pay, but this is tough to pull off in the Japanese corporate system.
If you suggest change, you will be consistently attacked, both by locals and other immigrants.
If they want to attract more tech workers they really need to up their salaries. People might go for maybe cultural reason or whatever but that pool is not enough to close the gap is guess.
Having a good salary is important but the work-life balance is just as important, if not more. I lived in Japan for a years (not as a dev, am now); I can make do with a lower salary due to healthcare being mostly sorted (you pay 30%, government pays 70%) and a good standard of living (better than London IMO), but I don't want to work absurd hours and deal with a toxic working culture, alongside a low salary.
I've met many talented women in Japan via Meetups and Women Who Code Tokyo and there's definitely no shortage of great developers. People just want a fair work-balance and an honest salary, which they are more likely to find at a gaishikei (foreign-run company)
I was thinking of maybe work a couple of years in a Asian country when the world starts opening up again hopefully somewhere in 2023~2024. So that I why I did some minimal research on salary.
If so, that is crazy. I think there should be an issue with that. I guess it will be interesting to imagine Japan as a women-oriented society.
Like the US in the 1950s.
It's not a matter of interest, it's that it has actually been the case that women are locked out of many high paying prestigious jobs, and software is/was the best available, where it isn't so prestigious.
There was a time when women simply could not get an engineering degree. And so, someone might study math, and end up as a programmer whose job title was "engineering assistant" to a male engineer.
If that was still a problem and I could get a remote job for a Western style company with better working hours that would be a serious decision point.
Not to mention the salary issue others have mentioned that I wasn’t aware of.
In the Netherlands one always chooses money over religion, race, culture and tradition. Your ridiculous pink hair and absurd American culture will be tolerated to service a higher purpose.
It´s most probably a paid ad in disguise (and I can point this out because I know a big consulting firm CEO that paid local media for this kind of "articles")
Curious thing is these articles always portrait a single cool young woman in their early twenties, never a woman with kids or a woman in their 30s or older.
Sadly this is not about equality at all, it´s about the employers having a bigger workforce so that they can reduce salaries and discard the old.
Computing is an smoke and mirrors kind of market.
But the mass media portraying her as a rebel for coloring her hair, that's like... Tabloid stuff.
Tech? Please don't make me laugh. Working at MSFT for a while, I've seen plenty of people in-person (even in management) with visible massive tattoos (even one with full neck covered in ink), piercings, and I am not gonna even start on wild hair styles and colors. One of the very senior people I've gotten a chance to work with had her hair color being split in half right down the middle - half black half white (ala Cruella from Disney's 101 Dalmatians). And mind you, out of all the big tech companies, MSFT is one of those that imo skews a bit of an older crowd, so I don't doubt this kind of stuff is even more common at places like FB.
One of my friends is a doctor in the deep south, and his arm is fully tattoed and is on open display at work (short sleeves). From my anecdotal experience, every time I go for an annual physical checkup with my primary doctor (in PNW), more than half of his nurse staff has either bright-colored hair or tons of tattoos (or, not uncommonly, both).
All of this is extremely acceptable in the US these days, barring few specific industries that still insist on ultrastrict "suit-and-tie" dress code and some rural areas. But in major cities? It would be impossible for me to walk through a block on the street without seeing at least one person with either neon-colored hair or very covered in ink or with tons of piercings.
But computers don't care. Not for your skin. Not for your hair. Not for your sexual preferences. Not for your gender. Computers don't care.
If you are "working with computers" and your colleagues are the "ones that care" to make your life hard. Then that is not a place I'd want to work. If society has this as an endemic issue, than that is not a place I want to live.
Coloring your hair as a student can get you in deep shit. Someone invented a temporary black hair dye for this, which I found bizarre until this was explained to me.
In Japan the equivalent is "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down".
Her dying her hair is ABSOLUTELY a large act of rebellion there.
I think you're underestimating the stigma against different hair colors in Japan. Japanese culture puts a heavy emphasis on not sticking out, to the point that even having a natural hair color that is different from the norm can be viewed as being rebellious.
https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-students-hair-color...
https://soranews24.com/2019/08/03/tokyo-public-schools-will-...
Shouldn't we hire/want people in the field because they are passionate and want to be there rather than some arbitrary skin pigmentation or assigned gender?
There was also rigging medical school entrance exams: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46568975
Women are substantially under-represented at both middle-management and senior level (i.e. boards); and face the second-largest pay gap vs their male peers in the OECD nations.
Japan's tax and social security systems also create penalties for dual-income households with large benefit cliffs and other similar structures so many types of part-time employment are economically discouraged.
Japan is difficult to emigrate to, as you need a work visa, and though knowing Japanese isn't a hard requirement for work, in most industries you won't be able to get a job without it. Becoming fluent in Japanese, with daily structured education takes around 2 years.