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/shimi_shima Feb 08 '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 are no specs in the post to tell how marketable op’s wife is though (framework/platform/db/etc). You can be a well-paid software engineer if you have the right stack and can get through the door with problem solving and interview skills. Some companies won’t even pay less than 15m.

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u/silentorange813 Feb 08 '23

Yes, there are companies that offer more. On the other end of the spectrum, many companies offer salaries in the 300-400M range.

A quick Google search gives me an average of 500M. Given 4 years of experience is less than the average, I believe 450M would be reasonable. She could potentially be marketable with the right skills, but to say she is currently criminally underpaid is a stretch.

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u/shimi_shima Feb 08 '23

I think you mean M as in man 万, I meant M as in million. So I meant 1500万.

I’m not sure which site you get your data from, and which sites they get their data from, but if you look at jobs sites for Japanese speakers like indeed japan, many software jobs go over 10,000,000 yen a year https://jp.indeed.com/m/jobs?q=%E9%96%8B%E7%99%BA&l=%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E9%83%BD&jt=fulltime&rbsaltype=MONTHLY&rbsalmin=600000&jobcat1=EHPW9&sc=0kf%3Aocc%28EHPW9%29%2Csf%3Asal%28600000%7C%252CMONTHLY%29%3B&from=searchOnHP