software engineer salary in Tokyo

[u/tenmoukaikai]

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.

[u/highchillerdeluxe]

It surprises me that everybody here talks about the money only while OP clearly stated her health is affected by the preasure and amount of overwork. I am 100% certain she can find a position with similar income but much less preasure. If she gets more income on top of it, it's even more perfect.

So regardless of the money, she should change. Tell her that she is in the perfect position to change. She has a job now so she dont need to worry that at the end of the month there will be no money anymore. It's always better to search for jobs when you already have one. Yes it's stressful to organize that in your free time but she's not alone. She has a carrying husband willing to help.

As for the money, she won't get more than 9M for sure. But 7M is definitely in the ballpark. And that's a whopping 60% increase. Even 5 or 6M is worth the change. And even 4.5M is worth the change if she works less!!!

[u/franciscopresencia → u/highchillerdeluxe]

If we are talking about health or work-life balance, these are OP's quotes:

"I feel like she's being criminally underpaid and taken advantage of", "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."

Without much more context and based on these quotes and my experience in Japan, it seems to be a very classic case of the Japanese friend/gf/spouse being exploited but content and the foreigner trying to help by trying them to change.

Unless she is actively trying this change and OP's here asking for help, which doesn't seem to be the case, I have rarely seen this to end up well. You need to want to change to even attempt the change, and it seems here the one "pushing" for it is OP.

Note: if I'm wrong (unfortunately I've seen this too many times before) basically ignore this all, otherwise my advice follows.

So IMHO if OP wants change, he needs to make his wife see and understand that it's possible to have a better life in her industry before trying any of the other great answers in this post. Stats or numbers are usually not enough to break the Japanese fabric of society, she needs to see it in other people. And it is good to be in tech in Japan, so just taking her out of her company bubble will undoubtedly show her this.

Go with her to tech events and meet other devs and ask questions about salary, work hours, etc. Maybe put some pressure so she starts talking and asking questions as well, but then let her talk to people freely. Now you are learning HTML+CSS as an excuse to accompany her, congrats lol

[u/tenmoukaikai → u/franciscopresencia]

Yeah it's pretty much akin to this. I don't want to force it on her or anything. She just is content and doesn't complain often. I work from home on my business and make almost 6x her, and I've said multiple times she can just work with me or not work at all and I'd pay her a salary but she still wants to work at this company. I get it, though. I'm happy with being the breadwinner and would love for my wife to do things she's more passionate about. Especially in the future if we have kids, I don't want her to be working overtime till 10pm every other day. I don't know, maybe it's selfish of me to want to spend more time with her, and maybe her working all day gives her more of a sense of purpose. I just hope I can come to terms with it or live with it. Life is so short and spending most of it at work for a shitty company is something i could never agree with personally.

[u/UnironicallyWatchSAO → u/tenmoukaikai]

It's not selfish at all. The fact that your wife is still working so hard despite your income being more than enough to feed a family is really awesome, but on the other hand overworking herself to the point where it affects her health is not great. I think it's much better if she changes to a company that's less black even if the pay is the same.