I am a 20-year-old high school dropout currently living in Kyoto (on a family visa) and enrolled in a Japanese language school.
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I have been teaching myself full-stack web development for a while now; I’m nowhere near mastering it, but I think I’m good enough to get a junior developer job. I just need real-world experience, be it an internship or a job, to get my foot in the door of the industry. Now the problems I have are
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1. I am a high school dropout.
2. My Japanese is not that good.
3. I don’t have any sort of degree since I am self-taught.
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As you can probably guess, my life is kind of messed up, to say the least🙂.
When I asked my sensei what I needed to do in order to get a job in IT, He said first I need to have at least JLPT N2 proficiency in Japanese, then go to either a vocational school (å°‚é–€å¦æ ¡) or an university and get a degree in IT. I can’t do both since I don’t have a high school degree, and even if I could, it would take me forever to get a job. I know a degree is not a necessity to get a job in IT (I don’t know about Japan), but it’s even better if you have one.
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So, I was wondering if it is possible for me to get a job or an internship in Japan, or am I screwed?
Is there anyone here who is a self-taught developer and has a job? I need some suggestions, my sweet and kind fellow humans🥺.
6 comments
Yes it’s possible. In my case, I had 0 programming experience, but my company trained me for 6 months, kind of like an apprenticeship. A university degree wasn’t required (although I needed it for visa sponsorship). You’ll really need to improve your Japanese though.
In my experience, Japanese companies are more forgiving when it comes to lack of experience/qualifications, but the salary and working conditions are not so great compared to foreign companies.
Remind me! 36 hours
I worked for Sony doing cyber security with an N3ish level but I was technically a U.S. employee at the time despite having a job based in Japan. The N2/1 rule isn’t firm if you have enough talent.
Your story, sad to tell.
A teenager ne’er do well.
Most mixed up, non-delinquent on the block!
Your future’s so unclear now.
What’s left of your career now?
Can’t even get a trade-in… on your smock.
Step 1. Bootcamp (Remote)
Step 2. Find job with Bootcamp’s help, and you will also have a personal website, and three real projects.
Step 3. Ignore Steps 1 and 2 if you already have real projects that you can show. Full stacks are also expected to be able to pass preliminary tests. Make sure you can finish at least level 5 challenges on code wars.
Japanese not necessary unless you have your eyes set in working in a Japanese environment.
Honestly, it highly depends on where you apply.
If you are applying to Japanese companies, then it would be required for you to know Japanese.
However, that requirement changes if you are applying for international companies based in Japan.
In that case, they would 100% instead ask you for skills and demonstration of said skills.
However, even without the necessity to get it, knowing more Japanese (to N2 level, or business level), won’t hurt you.
You’re still very young and have a lot of time ahead.
My advice: do what you can to get a degree. Find out what you need to do to get a high school degree here, even if you need to do a part time job at a convenience store. Once you have it, keep going and get a university degree or one from a å°‚é–€å¦æ ¡.
At the university they will teach you a lot of content that is fundamental, such as math and logic, assembler programming, digital circuits, algorithms… much of it won’t seem directly applicable to your job, but will help you understand the field better. However, the biggest advantages of a university degree are, in my opinion:
– Succeeding in obtaining the degree trains you on the kind of work methodology and discipline you will be applying in a real job
– It will open many doors, and will help put you closer to the front of the line for a job
– The connections you make while attending university / working with classmates will help you in the future
In the meanwhile, keep learning on your own, and maybe developing some simple apps to make some money on the side. If you need somewhere to host your apps then let me know. As long as you aren’t doing anything that’s illegal in Japan, I can perhaps give you free web/database/VM hosting.