People who work in IT earning close or over 20M a year, how did you do it?

12 comments

1. I joined a company in the US and got transferred internally to the Japan office (manager is still American though).

   I have about 3 years of experience in my current role but 5-6 total including a different job that involved some coding, and (this is important) about 10 years in a white collar job in general. At the end of the day I’m not really any better at coding than junior engineers on my team but I’m way better at project management, even have some people managing experience which is why I got promoted to earn this high salary.

2. Stem degree + japanese + startup where your boss is super dumb and thinks that if you leave the system will collapse…
   Other way Is fang/indeed lol

3. By being in a senior international sales position after spending 22 years in the business I was selling into and thus knowing it inside out. By not being afraid to travel and live in the markets I was working in. By being good at managing multi-national teams. By being good at my job and not being afraid to take a chance, a speculative punt if you prefer, and being responsible and accountable for my own actions. If you can do that successfully you’ll make 30M a year, I did until I retired 14 years ago at 62 yo.

4. If you want to make 20M in tech, you basically need to be at Google, Indeed, Amazon, Woven, or parts of Paidy, PayPay, and a small number of smaller companies. Maybe if you’re very senior there are a few more options, but even the domestics like Rakuten and Smart News don’t get to 20M for any IC role that I’ve heard of.

   If you want to get to those brand name companies, the standard path is to go to America or another respected market and build your career there. Come back to Japan through an international company, or at a Japanese company that will pay a premium for foreign talent.

   The pathway from “I came to Japan to teach English and now I make great money at Google/Indeed/etc. through an entirely Japan career” is very very thin. Not zero, but thin enough that it doesn’t have a standard playbook.

   Remember that if you look like domestic Japan talent, well, there are a lot of those folks around, and — real talk — there will often be a presumption that Japan talent is slow, process-oriented, uncompetitive, etc., compared to foreign talent. Fair or not, it’s a thing. You don’t want to be seen as exclusively in that pool.

   You want to be seen as part of the globally competitive pool. So, go prove you can compete in a global market.

5. Have you ever heard of Goodhart’s law? “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. This is exactly how I feel about leetcoding and the current interview process in tech. But this time it worked in my favor, as I was heavily involved in competitive programming in my highschool/college day.

   Thanks to that, I managed to join a big tech well-known for their hard whiteboard interviews. One promotion later and I broke the 20M barrier for the first time, in my early 30 at around 8 YOE. Then I job-hopped to a more senior role at a different one, which brought me to where I am now.

6. My boss is retarted. The VP of ai gets 60M per year and he does nothing related to AI. Only thing he does is api and hes 40 yo. So yeah its possible but you need a seriously retarted boss and luck.

7. Will you make it by staying in one place your entire career? Possibly.

   Do you have a better chance by proving yourself at your company, getting a promotion, and then jumping to a new company 1 year or so after promotion… then repeating that process 2-3 times? Yes. The important thing is that you have to prove yourself with each promotion and jump.

   The Tokyo IT world is relatively small and over time you can easily gain a good/bad reputation. Unless they are junior level employees, I rarely interview anyone that I haven’t already heard about from others.

   My last two jobs were largely gained by word of mouth/recommendation from others and, with that, I was better able to dictate my salary…. I still have to prove myself, but I wasn’t thrown into the pool with everyone else where I would have to justify why “I” was worth more than the other applicants… they asked me to join their company.

8. Develop skills that very few people or nobody else has, and find a niche that requires those skills. And be a very good bullshitter

9. May be if you ask half of that, you’ll get more doable answer.

10. You have to be a societal leech who makes more money than they will ever give back or contribute to society.

11. Much of it is supply and demand. If you possess a scarce skill you can get paid but it has to be scarce and it has to provide value over the average Japanese engineer-type. I’ve done well as a S/W engineer because I’m always honing my skills and trying to stay outside of my comfort zone.

12. I work in an IT-adjacent position and I don’t quite make 20m, but I attribute my current salary to: being old; working for a western company; getting lucky. If that helps?