I just got an offer from a small Japanese company in Tokyo with a large amount of foreign employees. I have 4 years experience as an engineer and have been working as an engineering manager for the past year, I also have relevant experience in the specific industry that the company is in.
The total compensation offer is 9M, including a bonus of 1.3M for the position as engineering manager.
I’m in other processes with large companies like Indeed and Mercari which offer higher salaries, but it’s difficult to know what to expect from a smaller company.
Is this a fair salary? How does salary negotiation work in Japan? Any advice?
Edit: added role and minor fixes.
7 comments
I posted a similar question, although I am in Cybersecurity…but I think the comps should be similar. 6-8 was supposedly considered normal…high comp was 9-12…and exceptional pay for individual contributor was 12-14+ (think FAANG level in Tokyo). Management was ballpark 9-14 depending on background, company, and experience. Senior management was was a bit higher with Dept. Head (CISO level prob) was ballpark 20. I got those numbers from here and a couple recruiters I have been talking to confirmed it…Seems like your offer is decent and on the lower end of senior level pay. Could be wrong though and others please feel free to correct me.
Well, honestly for a EM 9M is pretty low, even for smaller Japanese firms – I would expect EM’s to be seeing closer to 12+. That being said, you have very limited experience for someone in an EM role so its possible to get lowballed. On average EMs at Mercari for example tend to have 8+ YoE so close to double your YoE.
In terms of Salary though, Mercari tend to roll 12 – 20M for EMs and Indeed tend to hit the 25 – 35+ range (have interviewed for a 32M role at Indeed, didnt get it). So its likely either other company would offer more, though somewhere like Indeed have significantly higher standards.
Salary negotiation wise, the experiences ive had are “here is your offer” .. “can you do more?” .. “No, the offer is the offer”. There can be room for movement, especially in more western companies, but from personal experience there is very little room to negotiate with more traditional Japanese firms.
Half the women who live alone on their own live in poverty in Japan. If you’re looking for higher income, Japan is not a good place to do so.
For a manager role, it’s on the low end. But given you only have 1 year experience in the role and 4 years as an engineer, it might not be far off.
To give you some perspective. I was offered a salary of 13.5m and a sign on bonus of 1.9m recently for a standard cloud computing engineer role.
32 million? Good grief, what are the daily tasks for a role paying that amount!?
I am not dissatisfied with my job, my salary, my work life balance or colleagues, but looking at the yearly salaries posted here, I can’t help but feel I should starting getting into engineering or IT lol.
On a serious note: to those making the big engineering salaries, how do you evaluate your work life balance?
And how much time during your working day for you need to intensely concentrate?
I am well aware that sometimes the worst rather than the best paid jobs have the worst work life balance, so I am curious.