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"Dangling salaries of 10 million yen", or about $91k. The fact that this is considered unusually high tells you all you need to know about engineering salaries
by jpatokal 8y ago
"Dangling salaries of 10 million yen", or about $91k. The fact that this is considered unusually high tells you all you need to know about engineering salaries in Japan. (And yes, IT salaries are in the same ballpark.)
- tjpnz 8y ago5-6M JPY is pretty normal if you're an engineer here working for a traditional Japanese software company. Good news is that the number of people willing to accept that is growing fewer by the day.
- inteleng 8y agoNo wonder Sony can't compete in the hardware realm.
- cthalupa 8y agoThis is such a weird statement. What hardware realm? They're involved all over. Right now they're absolutely crushing the camera market - the A73 and AR73 are taking the world by storm, with tons of Canon and Nikon DSLR converts (Including myself). Their GM lenses are the sharpest available at a lot of focal lengths, the bokeh is close to the top of readily available modern lenses, etc. They're certainly competing there. Their UHS-II cards are some of the fastest on the market. The PS4 is the leader in lifetime sales vs. other consoles. What hardware are you talking about?
- acct1771 8y agoOffTopic, the Switch isn't the leader?
- majewsky 8y agoThe Switch has been out for less than 2 years, vs. 8 years or so for the PS4, which is quite a head start. It may outsell the PS4 right now, though.
- jsnell 8y ago> The Switch has been out for less than 2 years, vs. 8 years or so for the PS4, which is quite a head start You're off by a factor of two. The PS4 has been out for 4.5 years, not "8 years or so". > It may outsell the PS4 right now, though. In FY2017 the PS4 sold 19 million units. The Switch sold 13 million (15.5M sold in total so far, but 2.7M were in FY2016).
- majewsky 8y agoThanks for the fact check.
- dasil003 8y agoPS4 has more units sold than Switch and Xbox One combined.
- selimthegrim 8y agoTheir phones have been treading water in the market for years.
- digi_owl 8y agoDepends on the market i suspect. That said, they seem to do way less marketing than Samsung or Apple. Even so, they have carved out a niche of making smaller Android phones (their Compact variants) that share internals with their larger brethren.
- guelo 8y agoI agree with you but I do think Sony missed the chance to take advantage of their camera expertise and invent the best cameraphone first.
- scarface74 8y agoThe number of people that would buy a phone just for the camera is a small market and the phone market aside from the iPhone is a low margin commodity market. Samsung makes a lot of money from the phone market - but not from selling phones. They make most of thier money as a component supplier. Sony's camera division makes money from selling camera parts to other companies - including Apple.
- kalleboo 8y agoThe had the best cameraphones - the K800, K850 etc were way, way ahead of the game. Then the iPhone came out and just being a phone wasn't good enough. Now everyone else uses Sony's sensor anyway so what is their advantage? Lenses?
- digi_owl 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_T610 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_T610 Maybe not the first, damned close.
- flamemyst 8y agoOther factor also contributes to the demise of Sony phone division. Here in my country, Sony Z1 and Z2 boom as they are probably the first premium phone with nice camera and waterprof body. But bad aftermarket support and service destroy that advantages very quickly. Nowdays almost everyone avoid Sony smartphone. Either you choose phone with more support and service center such as Samsung or go to other way with Xiaomi (cheap with almost non existance official service & support).
- inteleng 8y agoThe Xperia phones and E-paper offerings are products where Sony could have been competitive with the market leaders (Apple, Amazon), partly because they were among the first to market, but they chose not to spend much on R&D and thus lost their dominance. My comment does not refer to the gaming and photography divisions, as those are cash cows for Sony.
- weiming 8y ago> Good news is that the number of people willing to accept that is growing fewer by the day. Curious if you have any insights on where do they end up going instead, even if anecdotal. (E.g.: smaller firms, own startups, or foreign (US/China) opportunities?)
- tjpnz 8y agoMy first job in Japan was working at one of these places so I've seen it first hand. In my case I left to join a US startup with an office in Tokyo. Most of my former colleagues did similar and are now working either in startups (mostly Japanese) or for foreign corporations that do development work here.
- ronnier 8y agoEven working for a US company in Tokyo I made a fraction of what I do here in the US. High level engineers I worked with got offers from google and Microsoft in Tokyo and the offers were less than $100k USD. They declined. Some moved to Europe, I moved back to the states. It’s mostly young single western men I see willing to take the pay cuts to live in Japan.
- cthalupa 8y ago>It’s mostly young single western men I see willing to take the pay cuts to live in Japan. My SO and I have seriously discussed moving to Tokyo when it comes time to raise a family. We're both pretty disappointed with the culture here in the US that makes it difficult to let your kids be independent and self reliant (See: Parents getting their kids taken away for letting them walk to the park, etc), and we've loved the time we've spent in Tokyo. The salary situation makes this pretty tough, though.
- Spooky23 8y agoLook at a private school first.
- voodootrucker 8y ago
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoWhat ballpark? Most software engineering salaries are much lower.
- laurieg 8y agoJust for a bit of perspective, my city center rent(non-Tokyo) is 45,000 yen and a meal in a restaurant with drinks is around 3000.
- merb 8y agohow much qm² does this apartment have (becase 45,000 yen is comparable to 350 euro which is extremly cheap, even if it is cold rent)
- mikekchar 8y agoNot the OP, but a 45,000 yen apartment in a city centre is likely to be quite small (essentially a studio apartment). It really depends on the city, though. You might be able to get a 1 bedroom for that in an older building. Apartments in Japan tend to be small and having lived in various places in the world, I'm going to say that it is not really comparable. For example, no matter what you rent, you are going to get a stupidly small kitchen: probably a single sink, 0.5 meter counter top and a place to put a konro (2 burner gas range with a fish grill). Apart from the kitchen (which takes a lot of practice to get used to), the bath room/wash rooms tend to make very efficient use of space. If you are living in Japanese style, you also put your futons away in the closet during the day and can live in what would be your bedroom. I live in a rural area and since I work remotely, I wanted an office in the apartment. We tried to get a 3 bedroom apartment (so we would have a guest room as well), but it was just impossible. Nobody could even understand why a childless couple could possibly use that much space. So it's more a matter of culture than price. In large centres you actually have a lot more choice. For example when I visit Tokyo, I often see advertisements for 4 bedroom luxury apartments. They are about the same price as you would pay in any other metropolitan centre in the world. However, things like that just aren't available in a lot of smaller places. You pretty much have to buy a house.
- laurieg 8y agoMy place is about 40sqm, which is quite big for a single person in Japan. My place before was in a similar location but 25sqm and is quite representative of a Japanese single occupancy apartments.
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- ronnier 8y agoThat’s why I left japan and came back to Seattle, really no reason to work for such little money and live in a small apartment when we are living through the best time to be an engineer in America.
- spaceman1331 8y agoit is a terrible time to be an engineer in america engineers are abused and treated like shit
- scrollaway 8y ago$91k for an engineer salary is unusually high everywhere outside of the united states and switzerland.
- humanrebar 8y agoIt's still low if you invented flash memory. Looking at market rates is the wrong paradigm for that kind of breakthrough. It presumes you could replace the flash inventor with another engineer for about the same salary.
- SagelyGuru 8y ago"It presumes you could replace the flash inventor with another engineer for about the same salary." Yes, you can, if you already own his patent and do not expect him to invent anything else. It seems that is how the management looked at it.
- msh 8y ago91k is not uncommon (it's often higher) for senior developers/engineers in Scandinavia.
- GordonS 8y agoSure, but everything in Scandinavia is expensive compared to the rest of Europe (I work for a Scandinavian company).
- philangist 8y agoI'd love to work in Norway or Sweden one day. Do you know what the tech scene in Oslo or Stockholm are like? My experience is mostly in building backend/distributed systems.
- mseebach 8y agoThe scene is great in Stockholm, anchored in Spotify, King and a good representation of games companies (EA has a decent representation if I remember correctly). My knowledge of Oslo is limited, but from what I have heard, thing are a bit stunted there. Copenhagen (my former home turf) used to be not great, basically software engineering was/is considered low status and all the smart devs in corporations were steered to higher status, but less technical, roles like architect, consulting or project management (or other middle management). Denmark really bought into the idea that we're the ideas people, the grunt work can be done in India or Poland or whatever. Some successful software startups came out of there, like Endomondo, Vivino and Zendesk, but they moved their centre of gravity to the bay area at first opportunity. This has since changed, and from what I've heard there's a fairly happening startup scene there now (still an awful place to be a corporate dev, though).
- konceptz 8y agoI came here to say this, thanks. On the dev side. I’ve been told that there are a few main consultancy firms which do the bulk of development for most companies. It’s more appropriate to hire these firms than it is to build your own teams. Because these firms do not pay high amounts to their devs, it sets the norm across the country.
- patio11 8y agoI mean there are a lot of causational arrows. In central Japan, for example, there exists an ultimate monopsony consumer of all engineering labor. Their salary scale is known to middle schoolers. All engineering labor is priced against that scale, sometimes directly, because that scale informs what they'll pay subcontractors and then the magic of consulting math replicates that scale across the supply chain.
- greggarious 8y agoI knew a guy who worked in the university IT department where I did my post-grad. He made more there than in Japan, and the cost of living was insanely low.
- SilasX 8y agoNormally patio11 would come out of the woodwork and explain that cash salary is a small fraction of "effective compensation" in Japan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576008
- patio11 8y agoI don't think you are interpreting that comment in this context the way I would. It is possible for an employee of a Japanese company to have a $91k salary and, also, a high internal status, resulting in non-pecuniary benefits as described. It is extraordinarily unlikely that employee is an engineer. (For additional "It's complicated!" context: I believe his bosses likely considered the offer they made him to be a plum. My ex-employer had a similar terminal outcome for distinguished engineers, where you'd be given a laboratory, perhaps an assistant or two, and total freedom. Is that a particularly compelling terminal offer? No. But it's an offer better than 99.8% of employees in the engineering track have. The mere fact that it is obviously better than what 99.8% of engineers get is a component of the offer; Japanese megacorps figure out that giving you money to purchase status is inefficient when they can simply award you status directly.)
- SilasX 8y agoRight but I had in mind your other point that a lot of the compensation is in the form of the benefits of having the business card, although I guess that wouldn’t have any value in terms of a promotion while staying at the same workplace.
- meric 8y agoThat's not what Toshiba pays - that's the salary headhunters use to take engineers away from Toshiba.
- sytelus 8y agoDoesn’t this come with perks like life long job security, retirement etc? I had heard that in Japan, working for a traditional company is like getting married.