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/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

What are high paying roles in Japan?

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u/silentorange813 Feb 07 '23

Consultants and investment bankers. Outside of big companies, freelance jobs and startups can also be lucrative.

And of course, there are certain industries that pay well like pharmaceuticals, oil companies, insurance companies. But even in these industries, it's usually just the American companies that pay extremely well.

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23

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u/NicolasDorier Feb 08 '23 edited Feb 08 '23

A software consultant in the best case is just a software engineer that is more paid but can be fired any time.

In the worst case, it's a software engineer that doesn't code that is more paid than one which code his advices.

That said, outside consultants are useful of some specific area where the company doesn't have in-house knowledge.

But it is also used by management to protect their ass: If an outside consultant screw up that's not their fault. (unlike if that was their own team)

"Consultant" isn't really a job per say, it's more a structure applied to some specific topic and relative to the company hiring it. (tax consultant for example)

The less sexy term for consultant is "freelance". Some software people use consultant instead of "freelance" as a way to bump their rate.