My wife has been working at an admitted ブラック企業 for over 4 years now as a Java engineer(japanese, doesn’t speak English), and she is the lead of her team of 3 others. She gets paid 4.5m yen a year and has 2-4 hours of overtime a day, and usually gets home pretty late. I feel like she’s being criminally underpaid and taken advantage of. What would be a salary that’s more in line with her experience? I saw posts from 7-15m for a java engineer with similar experience but I’m not super sure. I’m trying to help her 転職 and she does want to but she hates interviewing and also doesn’t want to let her current coworkers down by leaving. It’s been affecting her health both mentally and physically so i just want to help. She can’t even save money because most of her salary goes to paying her student loans. I handle our rent food and utilities, and she is pretty much working to repay Debt with nothing left over and i want to help her find a better opportunity. Any advice would be appreciated.
13 comments
4 years total experience at one company? I would aim for at least 6m. Its pays to change company, I do around every two years and get average 20 – 30% increase instead of 5% for staying at the same.
4.5M is ridiculous low.
You can make the same amount working in factory…
She’s just doing what a lot of overworked Japanese. Same story. It’ll get worse health wise. If you make enough to support her. Offer her to stay at home for a bit. That should let her stop worrying about letting her co-workers down.
Depends on a lot of factors. 4.5m is more or less new graduate level though.
Does she have a computer science degree, or is she self taught ? Does she speak English ?
Even without a CS degree she should easily be able to find a company that pays at least 5.5m with next to no overtime. If she has a related degree she should at least aim for 6m.
It is possible to get 7~15M (or even more) with 4 YOE, but with some caveats.
– Your wife will have to aim for a subset of companies that can offer in that range.
– Now is a tough time to get into such companies. Because many of them a having layoff, hiring freeze, hiring slow.
– She most likely will need to grind for the interviews.
If she does decide to give it a go then below are things at the top of my mind.
– Prepare now instead of later. She will want to have at least a few months of practice.
– As of now, leetcode is still very important. I don’t believe there is a clear correlation between actual SWE skills and leetcode skill. But it is what it is, so she should start practice leetcode now. “Cracking the coding interview” is a well known book, but personally I think “Elements of Programming Interviews” is a better one.
– To get a high offer, she also needs to ace the system design rounds. And for that, no resource is more valuable than the series “System Design Interview” by Alex Xu. You can’t change my mind on this.
– She needs to demonstrate her contributions to her current work. So she should review her projects and recall (or understand) why certain decisions were made, what were the alternatives, what were the trade offs. Don’t go into an interview and say I was told so when asked why you did something that way.
For Java, the company Indeed will easily pay 8m, that’s at the low end, it could be way higher than that depending on skill.
It will depend on many factors and the application but 4 years and management experience, I’d say between 7. 5 to 8.5.
You can get 4x that as a Java engineer at the right company
Above 8. She needs to put her resume to the tenshoku site.
Good luck with that, my wife’s cousin works as a programmer in Osaka and makes around the same. He’s in his early thirties though so I’m sure his salary will go up later on in life. Not sure where people are getting 7-15m from?!
I’m going to answer differently I would say that’s average if she’s like 26. Not good not terrible. Would have to see resume and actual skill though to give a better estimate.
4.5 million yen is about average for the specs you described. The reality is that software engineer is a poor paying job in Japan. There’s a reason why it’s generally unpopular at elite universities.
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It’s definitely expat-centric, but provides quite a few interesting metrics.