How to increase your income as Developer in Japan?

13 comments

1. Jump between companies and you can hit more than double in 5 years; don’t be the loyal employee, seek your own interest only and pretend to serve the company

2. What is your education background? It’s easier to climb up that ladder if you have one

3. You said dispatched so are you a Haken worker?

   Haken workers unfortunately will have a slow career growth. While they are good to get your foot in the door, if you want larger long term growth, no doubt you will have to move out of it.

   I would work on your coding portfolio, update your personal git and apply to a new job after 3 years at your current job.

4. Once you get your residence card renewed and have been working for 1+ year at your current company you can try to make the jump to a foreign company. They generally pay better and the work you do more worthwhile. Maybe a bit less in terms of job security but it’s harder to get laid off in Japan and if you are you can just move on to the next.
   Try getting in touch with recruitment agencies that work with foreign companies.

5. Do you have a need to stay JP for long term ?
   Cause your employee play a relatively important role to support your working visa
   Immigration bureau some times calculate your job stability when it need to renew
   And if without above problems, change your current job as quickly as possibe

6. You can only get a raise if you 1) get a better offer from another company 2) use 1) to ask current company to match or better the current offer. To get to 1) you probably need to polish up your resume/Linkedin/Indeed profile to get attention from recruiters through whom you will get information on companies currently hiring. It doesn’t guarantee anything but at least you have a direction and a goal set.

7. Time to change jobs

   Sadly companies here tend to only pay you an increase based on your current salary. Usually 10 to 20 percent (unusual), maybe higher if you are being highly underpaid at your current job. Making 5mill a year? Expect that the next company will offer you somewhere around 6m~ even if their range is like 6 to 10m.

   Job hobbing is sadly the only reliable way to get a decent jump in salary. The salary increase from staying at the same company won’t even cover inflation. There are exceptions, but they are definitely not the norm.

8. I would apply for Tokyo-based companies. That alone should help a lot. Probably focusing on tokyo-based startups (google “tokyo startup job board” and you’ll find a lot). Though the market right now kinda smells, and lots of places that would likely treat you well (v likely to double your salary _at least_) are doing hiring freezes.

   I think if this is your first job in Japan “the company was tough” is often an understood excuse to change out early. Another well-received excuse IMO is how haken involves jumping around a lot…

   Of course the main thing is whether you are happy, and you don’t need to be in the top salary bracket to be happy, but if you wrote this out you’re clearly unsatisfied.

9. Important to note that companies don’t give massive pay raises to existing staff because it’s practically impossible to *lower* salaries if things go south: If a company decided to give a 30% pay rise across the board then suddently saw business dry up – like, maybe due to some weird, totally implausible scenario like a global pandemic – it would have have little option but to lay people off.

   Companies keep pay hikes for existing staff all in a narrow range to keep things fair across all departments, and to keep things manageable and forecastable.

   Which is all fine and good – but yes, does mean you will generally need to change companies to reset your base wage.

10. Start making passive income on the side selling your inventions. Then, find the highest paid developer you can find and become his assistant. Or marry a girl from a rich family. Or do all three.

11. How’d you get a visa if you’re making so little money??

    In any case, you need to adjust your outlook. Software engineers, even complete noobs, even embedded in dysfunctional crap companies, generate an insane amount of business value in their day to day job.

    With 1-2 years of experience, you should be able to find a job where you’re making things that could put a 3百万/year employee out of work every month or two. (Or more realistically: Enable the 3百万 to be twice as productive). Just look at what white collar employees actually do all day. They basically spend all day wrestling with shitty primitive software and dealing with buggy edge cases.

    Looking at it that way, your market value is 1000万/year or more. You should be able to capture at least half of that without too much hustling.

12. Lame you’re making English teacher money at a programming job. I’d say you’ve the following options: (a) go on sites like japan-dev, which have the good jobs, and keep trying to land one of those, (b) try to get a remote work job for a foreign company (hard but possible, may be harder if English is your 2nd language, might want to take some English lessons to polish it up), (c) work out some in-demand specialty that you can freelance (staying off platforms of course), start doing that on the side and try to build it up

13. Tip: do not tell companies your current salary. Especially here in Japan. They always ask, and many will try to match it.

    That is private information.

    Just tell them your desired salary. And put it a good amount higher than your minimum desired salary