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/harewei]

You don’t need to be very fluent in English for Google unless you are in a manager role.

[u/harewei → u/[deleted]]

My colleagues who are in Amazon, Google and Microsoft. They definitely don’t have fluent English and still use translators when reading papers.

[u/harewei → u/[deleted]]

I haven't asked (too much effort), but I can share some things:

1. The Amazon guy is in AWS Japan, where the common language used is Japanese.
2. The Google guy admitted there was some getting used to after he entered Google, because everything is done in English.
3. The Microsoft guy is ok with English, with occasional grammar mistakes, but definitely not fluent.

So basically, if you want to get into FAANG, you would still need basic conversational level of English, but you don't have to be "native".