Pursuing a career in Software Development, in Japan?

12 comments

1. If you can speak good enough Japanese, there are companies that hire with no experience. Expect to work for peanuts for the next 3-4 years though.

2. It is going to be hard but I don’t think impossible. I can’t stress enough the value of a good connection. Attend as many tech meetups as you can and maybe even try to present at one. Focus on an area that you find interesting and figure out how you can showoff your skills.

   Just for reference I came to Japan with a degree in Computer Science but for some reason joined an eikaiwa right after school. So basically no real industry experience. When it became clear I would be staying in Japan I began to panic because I had no idea how to break into the industry here and no language skills. There was(this was over 10 years ago) a clear negative stigma to English teachers and every single interviewer wanted to know why I became an English teacher. It felt that no matter what I said I was wrote off as a joke. But I eventually found my start in a small software shop that did contract work for larger companies. The salary was crap for two 2 years but to my surprise the next job search was much smoother. I share this because it was hard even with a degree so it will be even harder without one.

   Wish you the best of luck!

3. I feel like you’d have a chance, especially if you feel comfortable using Japanese in a business setting.
   As someone in IT, if you’re github portfolios looking good and if you have enough material and knowledge to go through interviews, you’d be fine.

4. Yes it’s possible, many haken/itaku type shops have basically zero standards and can be a good way to get your foot in the door.

5. what do you currently do and can you work there as a programmer?

6. Someone with experience needs to write the authoritative “how do I get from English teaching to software” post, since we get a few of these questions every week.

   Noe a SWE, but from a related role:

   It’s gonna be hard, dude, especially right now. The entire industry is terrified that AI will kill all the SWEs. It probably(?) won’t, but between AI pressure, high interest rates, profitability pressure, layoffs, and hiring freezes everywhere, it’s a rough time to show up as a newbie.

   You’re going to need something to point to add a sign of competence to get started. You need a portfolio of personal projects you’ve done, you need a certification program, or *something* to make yourself credible and show you can learn and skill up fast as the industry goes through all this disruption. It’s not the same market that it was even just a few years ago.

   Note that if you want to make real money, and you need to work in English, it’s a very small set of companies. This is not something you’re interviewing for cold and walking into. You need to do serious work to train yourself for many months, you need to network and build credibility, you need to get sometime to take a big chance on you, etc.

7. You and every other ALT in Japan without any skills or experience or Japanese ability, you will find it almost impossible to get into SDE work. Good luck.

8. I am responsible for interviewing a lot of devs and all I want to know is what you can do. But frankly with only a tiny bit of study it will be a long time before I would consider you employable.

   Those of us who have made careers out of it and are on decent wages dedicated our lives to it.

9. The first job is always the hardest. I was lucky I got referred to a company by a uni classmate who worked there. This was before I graduated, so I did not have a degree, but it was not in Japan (but similar not-flexible market). Usually referrer gets a bonus too. 100% agree about the importance of connections /u/Limited-Express mentioned. A lot of big companies organise/sponsor meetups to hire people – I spoke on two meetups, we hired one person after my talk.

   I guess you have a work permit sorted, so the degree should not be a blocker. But from experience, candidates are prescreened by someone non-technical/automation and a degree is definitely a plus. I am doing interviews at my job, done probably something close to 100 in my career, including in Japan, and I never considered degree in the tech interview (coding/design). But everyone else in the hiring chain might and it affects salary conversation.

   Big companies have processes where you need to check more boxes. I heard good things about startup scene, I had a contact to one CEO in Fukuoka. Almost got hired there, but the salary was very low to what I wanted – again connections, he was a friend of a friend that had a coding school where I volunteered teaching tech English. Fukuoka has a lot of devs from China and Korea.

   Once you have a Software dev job on the resume, the next interview will be a lot about that job, what challenges you faced etc. Hiring managers love that convo, it gives a lot of good signal.

   The next step is to get hired by a big company with a known name. Once you have that on the resume, you don’t have to worry, you will have enough offers.

   One of the options would be to get a starter job in IT, like IT admin or testing – there is a lot of coding involved. Scripting, automation. Work on the coding skills, automate some dumb process and look for horizontal job change in that company to engineering.

   Definitely visit some meetups and build the connections, see who’s hiring and sponsoring the meetups.

10. I got a software developer job offer after 2 months of job hunting, without a related degree. Put up some projects on your personal GitHub, make a Japanese resume and start contacting agents and sending applications. You might be asked to do a programming test or exercise before or after the 1st interview.

    Good luck!

11. It is a lot of work, but possible. Probably will take a couple of years at least

12. First are you sure you wanna go for the Software dev route ?

    Have you thought about infra sys/net jobs ? GRC ? Support ?