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Comment by htag | Hacker News Reader

> The shift was made with the corporation’s shortfall in engineers in mind. Finding it difficult to secure enough Japanese, Money Forward decided to replace Japanese with English to attract foreign personnel.

How many English speakers are they attracting? I would imagine national immigration policy is the primary limiting factor for how many English speaking software engineers a company could attract. There's plenty of qualified people in the North American and Europe that would be interested in working in Japan while speaking English.

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The immigration policy for skilled professionals makes Japan probably the easiest country to immigrate to in the whole world.

The problem with software engineering in Japan is that the salaries are much lower than in the US, though they're not too awful compared to Europe.

These companies are, most likely, targeting talent from China, South Korea, or South East Asia.

Top talent from, say, Vietnam already speaks good English and many would jump to the opportunity to work in Japan under these conditions.

It's true; I have many more coworkers from China (+SE Asia) than from America. There's tons of IT professionals from China living in Tokyo.

I haven't met too many Vietnamese though, but I have met a couple. Japan also attracts a lot of Filipinos (though not so much in the IT sector, in my experience).

Can you give an indication of average salary?

Can you give an indication of average salary in the US?

40k-4m depending on skills and company

You can look at salary ranges on levels.fyi to get some indication of what pay is in different companies and cities in the US. For top level companies you can be looking at starting salaries around $150k for Bay Area.

I'm American; I know what salaries in the US are like. My point is there's no average salary; as the other person said, it can range between $40K and $4M.

If someone says something about the salaries explicitly they have numbers in mind and theories on how they should map. That's what I was after, and it's what I got. I think your stance that an average salary does not exist is nonsense, especially if you look at averages for seniority levels in relatively wealthy areas (which the entirety of Japan is).

My stance is that an "average salary" is pointless because the range is simply too wide and depends on too many factors to condense into a 1-sentence reply.

Also, the entirety of Japan isn't relatively wealthy, just like the US. The rural areas are dramatically cheaper to live in (for housing mainly) than the big cities. However, there's less "spread" than in the US: all the software jobs are going to be in a handful of large cities, not in some remote prefecture or village (whereas in the US, there are jobs in some smaller and even very small cities, where that one employer is likely the only place you can get such a job nearby and you'll have to move if the job goes bad). But even if you just look at Tokyo, the pay range can be enormous, at least a full order of magnitude.

For example, as a good senior engineer you could expect to get around 10-14m JPY, _maybe_ up to 16m is possible but a challenge.

Mid-level probably 5-10m.

That’s just based off what I was seeing when I was interviewing and considering a move there. Ultimately decided against it.

In higher skill/seniority levels ~30m salary (+equity/bonus) isn't outrageous expectations (the reason it might be unheard of is social/cultural). Even for ICs, not necessarily execs or managers. The positions/people I've encountered in this range have been for multinationals, 10+ yoe.

These levels are entirely in line with what you can expect in Europe unless you are willing to do incredibly unethical work. Even then it is hard to go far over. I'd go so far as to say these are normal salary ranges, even.

By the way it's not just salary. They're also subsidizing up to 80% of the cost of a home.

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