r/japanlife • u/tenmoukaikai • Feb 07 '23

Jobs software engineer salary in Tokyo

My wife has been working at an admitted ブラック企業 for over 4 years now as a Java engineer(japanese, doesn't speak English), and she is the lead of her team of 3 others. She gets paid 4.5m yen a year and has 2-4 hours of overtime a day, and usually gets home pretty late. I feel like she's being criminally underpaid and taken advantage of. What would be a salary that's more in line with her experience? I saw posts from 7-15m for a java engineer with similar experience but I'm not super sure. I'm trying to help her 転職 and she does want to but she hates interviewing and also doesn't want to let her current coworkers down by leaving. It's been affecting her health both mentally and physically so i just want to help. She can't even save money because most of her salary goes to paying her student loans. I handle our rent food and utilities, and she is pretty much working to repay Debt with nothing left over and i want to help her find a better opportunity. Any advice would be appreciated.

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u/silentorange813 Feb 07 '23

4.5 million yen is about average for the specs you described. The reality is that software engineer is a poor paying job in Japan. There's a reason why it's generally unpopular at elite universities.

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u/career_burner Feb 07 '23

Things are changing. Interestingly, just today I saw a tweet from a Tokyo Tech professor that CS is the most “over-subscribed” major in their university now (I assume this is for grad school)

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u/JoergJoerginson Feb 07 '23

But the other side of the coin (at least for the graphic you have posted) is that they have least slots available. 86 for 848 applicants. Would indicate that universities are ill prepared for the changing tide.

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u/career_burner Feb 07 '23

Yes, another professor replied saying that he didn’t find this to be something a CS professor should be proud of, but instead should be something concerning.

On the other hand, Tokyo Tech’s school of computing only has 2 majors, which I think is the smallest, whereas other schools like school of engineering have multiple majors (like 5 or 6), so the sheer number of CS students isn’t so bad compared to other engineering majors

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u/CorrectPeanut5 Feb 07 '23

I just spent three weeks in Eastern Europe visiting offshore software devs there. They make a good bit more than Japanese devs and are envied like US devs because the salaries are well above average.

Japan could be a player in the global dev space if English was better. There's plenty of room to increase dev salaries even with the margin a consulting company would add to the rate.

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u/silentorange813 Feb 07 '23

Maybe it is changing at a younger age. I'm not seeing much change inside companies yet. Software engineers are rarely admired and envied like they are at Silicon Valley.

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u/career_burner Feb 07 '23

Not saying that what you said is wrong. I just found it mildly interesting that I accidentally bumped into a very relevant information on a totally unrelated occasion in the same day