Moving to Tokyo. 20+ years of development experience (primarily “backend” but all over the place at this point). I’m OK with greatly reduced pay for a few years, but what sort of culture / dress code / wfh policy should I expect for a NON Japanese speaker? Networking advice?

3 comments

1. This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.

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   **Moving to Tokyo. 20+ years of development experience (primarily “backend” but all over the place at this point). I’m OK with greatly reduced pay for a few years, but what sort of culture / dress code / wfh policy should I expect for a NON Japanese speaker? Networking advice?**

   (_I know there are tons of “I’m a developer” questions on the front page right now, sorry!_)

   ### Context (skip if you don’t care, most of it in the title, some tech details if you’re interested!)

   I crammed lots into the title, but to restate with more detail:

   1. Moving to Tokyo
   1a. I do NOT speak Japanese
   2. Will be on a dependent visa (so would _either_ have to get a dependent work permit and work 28 hours, or a company would need to sponsor me – honestly I’d be OK with either)
   3. I’ve been working at a startup in the US for about a year, but have done implementation work for a few different San Francisco based “agencies” the past 10+ years
   4. If it matters, and without writing out my entire CV, I’m sort of a jack of all master of a small subset. I’ve written React, I’ve written Angular, I’ve written Vue, but I’m not proficient at any of them… still I understand them and their concepts (e.g. Angular gives you rails, ngrx, React hooks vs classes, etc, etc). I’m by far more of a backend developer and have done lots of ecommerce work (Magento, ElasticPath, Adobe CIF), middleware integration (e.g. working with Azure or Lambda to build compatibility layers between systems), and general API development “stuff” (lots of time recently creating a federated GraphQL service in Node / TypeScript). Also, infrastructure stuff, while I’m not at all authoritative, I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently with AWS CDK and working through “serverless” patterns (and back to long running more traditional servers-ish with Fargate). And a bunch of other random stuff.
   5. TypeScript, Java, PHP, SQL, HTML, CSS, a _tiny_ bit of C++/Rust
   6. Overall I’d probably look for a job as a “senior” level engineer somewhere, because I prefer to be an individual contributor, though depending on where I got a job I might frankly be under or over qualified (most of my work has some degree of “architecture” type work, I just prefer to contribute and not steer the ship so to speak).

   Anyway all of this said, I’m not worried at the moment about taking a huge pay cut, I understand and appreciate the reason for the pay discrepancy and frankly feel like software people in the US are paid an obscene amount anyway.

   What I strangely (or feel free to call it stupidly!) am sort of dreading is having to go buy a suit and dress shoes and stuff to wear into an interview. I understand I’ll have to suck it up and deal with this if I’m living in Japan most likely.

   ### Questions

   I’m curious if I apply to a smaller company (English) if I’d have a MUCH better chance working somewhere I could wear jeans and a t-shirt to work? ~~A company like Rakuten is an obvious candidate, but it seems they are “business casual” and I assume with the larger company comes less flexibility?~~ (_edit: pretty sure I don’t want to work at Rakuten_).

   Are many tech companies (again, the 0.1% of them I could get hired at speaking only English) offering work from home policies? I actually _prefer_ to go into an office, it’s part of the reason I’m bothering to get a job in Japan at all, but would be nice to be able to work remote sometimes if I wanted to travel or be out of town for whatever reason for a week or something.

   Are there many good networking opportunities in Tokyo for english speaking tech people that you’d personally recommend? I’m aware of meetup.com (and actually attended a meetup through there before and even gave a small presentation randomly!), but I’m wondering if there is anything people would actually recommend?

   For somebody learning Japanese (“Where is the cat? This and this cup are black.” :(), are there any conferences or other tech events that might be more accessible to just passively watch / listen to, without a huge barrier to entry (e.g. somewhere I could be a fly on the wall without having to make people feel super uncomfortable)?

   Any other advice for a more senior level software person coming to Japan (default option is try to leverage my network in the US to get a part time consulting gig – probably make as much money if not quite a bit more than working in Japan, but navigating taxes or dealing with the moral baggage of NOT navigating them is difficult!).

   Thanks for your time!

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2. IME most tech companies, even the big Japanese ones like Mercari, Line or PayPay seem to put forward a cool developer kind of image; I’ve never heard of a developer having to wear a suit or even business casual.

   WFH depends on the company, but as you no doubt know we’re seeing a retreat from WFH globally. Some notable exceptions include PayPay, which has a work from anywhere policy.

   There are good networking opportunities, yes; Meetup is a good place to start. The local iOS meetup is one I would recommend.

   A lot of large companies do their own engineering-focused events, but I’m not sure what I’d recommend as you don’t know anything right now. More than any specific terminology, I feel like you need like an attack dose of Japanese – night school, maybe?

   Honestly, the language barrier will likely be an issue given your seniority, UNLESS you join a FAANG, and even then it’ll likely kind of suck. I don’t know how you’ll be able to manage or mentor Japanese people below you, or be seen as someone that Japanese management can count on, and that’s if you get the job in the first place. (To be clear, I hope you get something!)

   You say you’re coming on a dependent visa; sure, you could do remote work under the 28h limit AFAIK, but there are some concerns here not just around hours. You’re not allowed to earn more than your spouse when you’re a dependent, which I think you’d run into fast if you’re earning USD and your spouse is not.

3. If you don’t speak Japanese and don’t have a Japanese passport/family or SO, your only chance is to work for a western company that offers jobs in Japan, otherwise there is very little chance you can even apply for a work visa there. I recommend just traveling there for an extended period of time if you want to experience the culture, etc.