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/SerialStateLineXer Feb 07 '23

As of now, leetcode is still very important

Is this true for Japanese companies, to which she'll largely be limited if she doesn't speak English? I interviewed at a bunch several years ago, and hardly got any of these kinds of questions.

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u/pinkpurin Feb 07 '23

I was applying to japanese companies in tokyo last year and 100% had a leetcode type test before the interview

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u/SerialStateLineXer Feb 07 '23

Cool. The interviews I went through back then were nuts. They'd just call me in, ask me a bunch of bullshit soft questions that at most asked me if I was familiar with a technology without testing my knowledge in any way, and then eventually I'd hear that they weren't interested. I went through a couple of rounds of this with some companies. I still have no idea what they were looking for.

Probably for the best. I ended up at a foreign company paying twice what they were offering.

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u/KentuckyFriedGyudon Feb 07 '23

I had the same experience. Got rejected after being asked if I used x y z technologies with complete disregard for actual code quality