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CEO behind Japan’s best-performing stock says his secret is raising salaries
- mancerayder 5y agoWhat an annoying headline. It's plausibly deniable, and yet implied, that the secret to stock gains is high salaries. It's not what's meant, of course.
- NalNezumi 5y agoWhile establishing a "cause & effect" here seems very hard, from my personal experience working in software field in Japan, I think the winning concept here is actually the combination of removing middleman and paying good salaries. Japan is very very behind in IT/digitalization compared to most western countries. This doesn't just mean it's behind in product portfolio and quality, but that perception of software engineer & managers and still quite behind. The respect that a lot of software engineers enjoys in US/EU is not quite there yet in Japan(and salary often reflect this). The C-suite usually doesn't have a firm understanding of software/IT world, and instead ends-up hiring a lot of "Scrum-experts/Agile coaches" and hires software engineers from consultancy or recruitment companies for cheap. There's ofc companies that doesn't fall in this category, but for middle-sized companies in Japan (which is the bulk of the economy), this is the true state of things. Middle-men in Japan have therefore been way more encroaching on this, and they have the incentive to not improve the respect/social standing the software engineers have. "Removing managers" in this article does not mean the same thing as it would in US/EU, conditions are different.
- rurounijones 5y agoAs a further example: In my last full-on japanese company it was basically impossible to find any developer with more than 3 years experience by accidental design because: 1: No applicants studied computer science in university so they started learning when they joined the company and were assigned a development role. 2: After 3 years they they got promoted to a "manager" level role and stopped doing development. There was no concept of junior developer -> developer -> senior developer progression. If you wanted promotion you went from developer -> manager; it was the same for sysadmins. Their IT and development suffered heavily for it. A team of 10 "western" style trained senior developers and sysadmins would have been able to do the work of 50 current employees at least for a large overall cost saving even with higher salaries. Just the way things worked. Japan is indeed very different when it comes to how the workplace works in relation to tech in traditional companies.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoAs a 195cm tall, 120kg, non-Japanese, senior developer who has never been to Japan, I kind of want to get a job at a Japanese company and just see what happens.
- xupybd 5y agoTry Vietnam, they are the shortest in south east Asia. I'm 190 and couldn't fit in a seat at a restaurant outside of tourist spots.
- JCharante 5y agoThere's tons of non-tourist spots where you'd fit. It's not super uncommon to find guys who are 180cm or taller, the tallest I've met is 194cm while waiting for the bus. Even at 181cm you do have to watch your head though.. I've hit my head many times while going up stairs, and for those who don't know stairs are extremely common because many businesses are split up across multiple floors of a narrow building.
- xupybd 5y agoWhen I say I don't fit I'm being a little hyperbolic. I'm talking about sitting at a table with tiny plastic chairs and having my knees sit well above the table.
- markb139 5y agoI'm 200cm and been an ad-hoc tourist attraction in various places I've visited :) Except Hanover, where everybody seemed just as tall
- geoduck14 5y agoI have a friend who is about that tall. Every time my 3 yo sees him, she asks for a ride on his shoulders. They wall around and touch ceiling fans.
- 5y ago
- kh1 5y agoVery true, especially hiring "Scrum-experts/Agile coaches" and cheap engineers from outside. Based on my experience, they don't have good understanding of the business, so business people need to write up word-for-word documentation (e.g. Take this column from spreadsheet and multiply by 100 to show the numbers in percentage). At this point, business people who have programming skills wonder why they have to work with corporate IT. On the other hand, don't many western companies outsource IT work as well? Having never worked in US/EU tech industry, I don't see much difference when it comes to outsourcing. (hiring temp engineers is obviously different from outsourcing, but the concept must be the same)
- taurath 5y agoShhh, buddy, he’s saying raising salaries here we don’t need to give alternate ideas ;)
- sokoloff 5y agoRemoving useless middlemen allows for raising salaries of the producers.
- taurath 5y ago> Japan is very very behind in IT/digitalization compared to most western countries. This doesn't just mean it's behind in product portfolio and quality, but that perception of software engineer & managers and still quite behind. Have you used anything digital in Japan? I find the interfaces to be fast, user friendly, and energy dense. Far better quality than what most of the western software people put out. You might need to clarify what you mean by behind - just business culture?
- throayobviousl 5y agoIs it a coincidence that sony and nintendo have horrendous online offerings?
- asutekku 5y agoWhat? The digital interfaces in Japan looked and felt like they were at least 10 years behind the curve. And if "energy dense" you mean that every single possible option was crammed to a small screen estate then sure.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoI have a personal lifetime ban on buying Panasonic/Matsushita products because of the cruddy alpha quality firmware they built into a dvd player. It crashed 100% of the time when playing CDs among many other unforgivable flaws. Their fix in the revised model was to put a reset button on the front panel. Japan cannot manage complex software without a lot of time and manpower.
- chrisjharris 5y agoI can see that you mean well but I really cannot agree with this statement.
- taurath 5y agoI feel as though I was thinking about web applications for major companies and everyone else was thinking of software for built in electronics, which I agree is awful
- eecc 5y ago> he respect that a lot of software engineers enjoys in US/EU And then you go on describing the average attitude towards software developers I perceived in the Netherlands… :)
- f6v 5y agoCould you elaborate?
- tralarpa 5y agoI am not OP but I have noticed in several European countries that many companies see software engineering (and IT in general) as a "necessary evil". Even in SMEs selling automation solutions, the perception is that the "real" work is done by the mechanical/electrical engineers and the marketing department, while the software engineers are just...support people, aren't they? And everybody has learned a little bit of python programming at the university, no? /s You need official certificates to be allowed to work with high voltage. But the program that controls that machine there, well, it can be written by some Germanistics student who can't find a job in his original field (no offense intended. I know several brilliant programmers who never studied. I just want to illustrate the difference). If you understand this attitude, you will also understand why the general state of cybersecurity in such companies is such a problem.
- f6v 5y agoI spent a lot of time in Berlin where there's no industry, just software. I can imagine that the attitude is much different somewhere in the west or in the south.
- rkangel 5y agoI think this is common in the rest of the US/EU as well. The difference between how "tech" companies treat software engineers is very different from how "normal" companies treat software. Tech companies "get" that the difference between good and bad software is enormous and that it's worth doing the work to get good people to build it, other companies usually don't.
- yulaow 5y agoDo we get respect as SWE in EU? In every eu state I have been, except maybe uk in some sector, there was the meme that we are "the new blue collar workers" and indeed in a lot of places salaries were pretty much aligned
- wsc981 5y agoI think it you want to feel respected as developer in Western Europe, you should be consulting. The best way to get a respectable compensation for your efforts.
- varispeed 5y agoThe governments found out that people are making too good money doing this. For example in the UK there is a term "disguised employment" thrown around and consultants being smeared as tax dodgers. This year they changed the law, so that company must declare whether hired person is a genuine contractor or de-facto an employee. There is a fine if they declare a disguised employee as a contractor, but not the other way around. The effect is that companies now offer contracts that always place a contractor as a disguised employee to avoid problems with the tax man. As a result such consultant has to pay over 50% in effective tax. Many good ones I know already looking to move overseas.
- ehnto 5y agoI am a software developer, and I feel software developers expect a lot more than is reasonable if they consider themselves part of the same society as everyone else. It's just a job like any other, and it's only in certain bubbles that developers are treated like rockstar prodigies. For the rest of the world, or even just the rest of the US, to expect exceptionally high compensation in order to feel respected is unreasonable in my opinion. Software is an incredible tool and I'm glad to still find ways to love it, but as a profession, it's just like any other. I have felt this way for a while, because I feel we can do a lot more meaningful work within our communities with software than we currently do. But all the developers are instead busy building Nudity in Kettle Reflection algorithms for market place image uploaders while getting rained on by VC money.
- fukmbas 5y agoThe US is going backwards. IT departments used to be lean now they're full of MBA types trying to ride the Product wave. For the last decade I had no one between me and the end user. Now there are no less than 4
- Forge36 5y agoBut will it scale? Sounds great as an employee. What explanation exists to convince an employer?
- DangitBobby 5y agoIf they can continue to eliminate middlemen who do nothing but skim their rates off of the layer below them then sure, it will keep scaling.
- Spooky23 5y agoPay peanuts, get monkeys.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoYou can pay 3-4x more for an employee that is 10x more productive (This is what I think about Netflix). It's a great deal for everyone. I don't think you can really convince most employers of this though.
- sombremesa 5y agoI don’t know - the wfh revolution is changing this equation. The more productive employees (10x etc) can just scale down their output commensurate to compensation and expectations based on the median employee and enjoy a better work life balance now.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI'm not sure you what you mean. If you're working somewhere like Netflix I'm assuming the median employee is quite good, so "scaling down" your output to match that doesn't really make sense to me.
- lacksconfidence 5y agoThe implication is a 10x employee could work half a day a week at a "normal" (not netflix) job and from the outside it's the same amount of output as a 1x.
- Rzor 5y agoOutline didn't work for me: https://i.imgur.com/ydYsy4q.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ydYsy4q.jpg
- o-__-o 5y agoYeah! Casual copyright infringement! I guess the reasoning goes, gpt-3 will make journalism go the way of the dodo bird
- jppope 5y agoI think we would all be happier if hacker news rejected sites that had a paywall... unfortunately, those companies keep posting articles on HN ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. And so it goes
- nuclearnice1 5y agothose companies keep posting articles on HN?
- Black101 5y agoI had no problem viewing the article... I use noscript and ublock origin addon among others....
- riffraff 5y agoI think we would be happier if people paid for quality journalism. I myself bypass paywalls often, but I am very worried of the ultimate effects of not paying for news. I wish we had more LWN-style "this article has been made public thanks to X".
- magneticnorth 5y agoI've generally always had good luck with archive.is https://archive.is/T28ui https://archive.is/T28ui
- shp0ngle 5y agowhat works for me is just disabling JS. That actually fools a lot of websites - like NYTimes and I think WaPost.
- SMAAART 5y agoIt's not the whistle that pulls the train! Chances are that Tange hired well qualified employees tht fit the corporate culture (and fired the ones who didn't fit in), and continued to reward as objectives were met. Remind me of Netflix and GE 20 years ago.
- MattGaiser 5y agoWhat is turnover like in Japan? Do people turnover? It seems like a place where people stay at one company for a career.
- iratewizard 5y agoHistorically that was extremely true. A salaryman would not be hired by a company that would let him retain his social status if he were fired or left. Poaching was uncommon practice. It's becoming much less true today, but it's not over yet.
- unishark 5y agoHistorically it was true in the US too. When I first graduated, some big companies still had pension plans they'd try to entice you with. I'm sure there's a direct link between increasing salaries and the prevalence of job-hopping.
- towardsclarity 5y agoI don't think raising engineers' salaries is particularly controversial. Google, Microsoft, etc have been paying more for top talent for ages. The main controversy in the political discussion is around paying low wage workers more.
- xwdv 5y agoSurely the raging bull market of the past decade played no part in these gains.
- bluedevil2k 5y agoThere was no bull market in Japan.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- quantum_state 5y agoIt is the way to go if one were to build software that can last ... 3 to 4x pay to get 10-100x output and quality ...
- krishvs 5y agoSounds good but does this scale in the long term? Looks like a resource placing firm. Not sure about japan, but in India it is expected that on average as an employee you get a 10 to 15% hike year on year primarily due to inflation pressures. How would this company be able to afford this if they are both reducing prices for customers while simultaneously increasing base salaries. Wouldn't the employees leave after 2 or 3 years as the hikes would not be possible after sometime?
- lupire 5y agoSurely it's a good thing to have employees leave who think $X is less than (X/2)*1.15
- celticninja 5y agoI think the point would be you are already earning above average for the industry. No guarantee the next job will match that salary for the same type of work. Sure you can go the promotion route but the. You don't need to leave the company to pursue that.
- noisy_boy 5y agoLeave and go where else in software testing in Japan? Based on the article they are paying a lot more than other software testing companies. Also, if they are paying people well and treating them well, a sizable chunk would like to continue even if the salary increases dwindle as long as they are not underpaid compared to the market. I also think that Japanese culture would inspire more loyalty to well paying, well treating companies compared to SV.
- jacobr1 5y agoJapan has had much lower inflation rates than India over the past few decades. Famously Japan has had close to 0 inflation. It seems like the real reason for this firm's success though, is removing multiple layers of contractors. Just hiring skilled engineers and paying them fair rates seems sufficient to shake up the industry. That seems sustainable to me - provided they keep salaries competitive - presuming some of their competitors try a similar approach.
- deleted 5y ago
- lupire 5y agoHeadline is contradictes by the article. The company replaces layers of contractors with direct employees.
- ecpottinger 5y agoBut he also gets good direct employees by raising the wages he is willing to pay for the same work. The higher pay means he has the pick of the good employees.
- p_l 5y agoLayers of middlemen The company itself is contracting, they just cut out a huge value-skimping set of middlemen, and the savings involved mean they can simultaneously undercut their competitors while pocketing more money, which is fed into employees' salaries.
- cutemonster 5y agoDoes middlemen here mean middle managers, or layers of contractor agencies?
- p_l 5y agoLayers of contractor agencies
- savant_penguin 5y agoI'd like to question the premise. How confidently can you associate cause and effect here? Based on what can he guarantee that raises in salary caused the company to grow? If the formula is so simple couldn't other companies copy that and grow 5500%?
- economusty 5y agoI guess it would depend on how underpaid the groups where profits are created are. Absent any other catalyst a random event of paying people more followed by a marked increase in productivity would be enough correlation to say "hey, I think this is probably the cause"
- andrewljohnson 5y agoHe didn’t just raise salaries... he cut out management too. It makes sense to me the bottom feeder testing companies might not be running very profitably and this strategy could work... pay better people marginally more and have fewer managers.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago>How confidently can you associate cause and effect here? You cannot. It depends if you’re buying commodified labor and selling commodity products. Walmart and McDonalds franchisees are not going to see much difference other than higher labor expenses and reduced sales due to higher prices at competitors.
- rileymat2 5y agoIs this true? When I worked as an assistant manager at Burger King, you could see employees that were more productive by a large factor. If paying them more led them to stay longer it would have been a big win. The best could do the work of 2-3 people, if paying them 1.5x more means they stay, you more profits on lower labor costs. What is hard to do is create a repeatable process for this. And trusting local management.
- ecpottinger 5y ago
- benatkin 5y agoHave they thought of lowering their competitors' salaries? https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_closed/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_clos...
- aphextron 5y agoEveryone's a genius in a bull market.
- tanjtanjtanj 5y agoThe bull market of Japan that hasn't seen significant gains for 30 years?
- hardwaresofton 5y agoSome context on the japanese job market from what I've seen: - The entire japanese job market's wages are depressed[0] - In 2019, pressure had to come from the PM (not the local unions) to raise the minimum wage to 1000 yen/hour (~$9/hour)[1] - Engineers are underpaid here, possibly more so than the EU in relation to the US. This is amplified for japanese companies (whether "black"[1] or not) - With nationalized healthcare and generally low cost of living (even in Tokyo, a "world city"), most workers do not feel the pain of being underpaid sharply. Cultural differences and a propensity to save (more ant than grasshopper, let's say) generally feels like the backstop behind the economy (other than the BOJ's enormous purse and very active involvement). - There is a sort of inbuilt trust in the society that expresses itself in economic transactions (loan companies can be very trusting, risk is considered low with Japanese applicants, etc) and greases the wheels of commerce most of the time, if all participants are local. There are other factors (sometimes the same ones) that make it difficult/slow down japan but those are well discussed generally. - "Super Salaryman" is a colloquial term here (I can't find it on wiki or elsewhere) for a salaryman[3] that makes 10 million yen (~$90k) per year - Japanese companies often provide "free" company housing to new grads to enable them to save while being paid relatively little. Many live with for a bit after graduating (women more so than men) as well without much stigma. - Company standing/appearances mean alot -- $60k at [large conglomerate] is far and away more prestigious than $80k at [unknown startup] in the eyes of many. [EDIT] Added some more from a different comment that might be useful. [EDIT2] - fix the super salaryman yen estimation, confused with 10 million [0]: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/03/17/business/lowest-pay-rises/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/03/17/business/lowest... [1]: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/06/07/national/japan-facing-increased-pressure-hike-minimum-wage-business-leaders-give-mixed-response/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/06/07/national/japan-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japanese_term) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japanese_term) [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman
- wait_a_minute 5y agoThis is very interesting. So a person can raise a larger family on an engineer’s salary and be happy in Japan? An American expat.
- koilke 5y agoHaving had experience in a company that acts as middleperson/outsourcing company, many of the employees where working for company A and then outsource to work for company B. They would be hired as full time employees at company A and let us say in my example start with a salary at around 30k USD per year and the company A would receive around 120k USD per year by letting that employee work for company B. I thought it felt strange to know(although they tried to keep it secret) that one received about 25% of the work one did in terms of salary. This was a hugely profitable business model for a company and in a more competitive economy, such models would be difficult. Apparently, this gentleman realised that if you can cut off these middlepersons there are great opportunities for business, you could double and triple the salaries of the employees and probably still make a profit.
- onion2k 5y agoPaying someone X and charging 3X for their time is not "hugely profitable". Employing someone is pretty expensive. You have to account for all the costs of employing them (payroll, admin, HR, project management, etc), the fact you still need to pay them for the time they're not being charged to a client, the cost of an office for them to work from and equipment for them to do the work, and so on. It's common in business admin to account for at least 2X of someone's salary as the cost of employing them. If you charge less you'd be making a loss.
- Jare 5y agoI've seen the "paying 4x" phenomenon at a former company (a long time ago tho). The external "expert" consultants worked with us for 3+ years, used our equipment and offices, and at least one of them didn't understand why C sizeof() was not giving him the length of the string.
- onion2k 5y agoCompanies hire external experts (or "experts") in order to fix hiring problems (can't find the necessary people), or because they find it hard to predict future needs (might only need them for 3 months, or 3 years), or because they don't have the management team in place to manage those people (every person hired is a call on managers to give them work to do, and more admin to do). These are all things that are often well worth paying 4X what it'd cost to employ the staff themselves.
- spfzero 5y agoI’m thinking it would be a rare CEO who both knew what they did to cause the stock price to go up, and not be involved in gaming the financials to make the stock go up.
- sitkack 5y agoSssshhhhhhhh.
- threatripper 5y agoIf you pay slightly above average and treat your employees well you will get the best talent, they will be motivated and they will stay longer. Caveat is that only a fraction of the companies can run this strategy or the average pay rate will start to rise continuously.
- jiofih 5y agoThat’s not a problem as it’s not a zero-sum game. Everyone could get their pay raised at the same time and the overall productivity would go up accordingly, until some point of equilibrium.
- threatripper 5y agoIf you increase all wages at the same rate then inflation rises (as you don't increase productivity and resource availability accordingly) and you devalue savings. This is not a bad thing overall. It certainly is better than losing a war.
- hrktb 5y agoNot disagreeing, but the devil’s advocate: sometimes you don’t want to be keeping the contractors longer, and will use them as fuses to shelter your business when bad times come. This is at least part of the reasoning behind having layers and layers of sub-contracting companies paying their employees low wages.
- snovv_crash 5y agoAs it rises it starts to pull in talented people from other fields who wouldn't take the job otherwise (coming from everything from finance to biology). There is a lot more supply-side variability than people realise based on salary differences, and money can paper over a lot of work satisfaction issues, at least temporarily.
- cutemonster 5y agoMaybe also some clients will be happy to pay more, if they notice the quality is better
- jussij 5y ago> Tange, 46, says his business model is an attempt to remove inefficiencies in Japan’s software industry, where layers of subcontractors take cuts on orders before passing the work to another company below. This reminds me of a role I once had back in the late nighties. I was hired on contract by a multi-national consultancy firm to help out on one of their projects. The need someone to come in with good C programming skills. When I started I was amazed to find a 70 developers and testers workforce working on the project, most of whom were straight out of university. A nice earner for the consultancy firm; they were charging their development team out at $150.00 per hour, yet only paying graduate salaries. It must have been $100+ profit per hour per developer.
- hardwaresofton 5y agoWant to say that this model is still alive and well in Japan (like anywhere else obviously), and these days it looks like charging $10k/month (a lot to companies here for a single developer) for $2-5k/month developers in APAC or eastern Europe, with the guarantee that the project will be looked after based on the sensibilities of someone local/from the US (this person is usually the face of the business or extremely high up, etc). At it's worst this pattern is parasitic but at it's best it's mutually beneficial symbiosis -- if we look at the reality of whether the developers could clear the trust barrier (whether it should be there or not is another question) to getting the roles, it becomes a question of what that barrier skip is worth. BTW, Japan is rife with middlemen taking cuts. If you want to have a chuckle, look into property purchasing in japan/proptech. There are usually 3+ middlemen in the apartment purchase flow here, and fees that you do not see in most other places, ex. "reikin" (AKA "Key Money")[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_money
- franciscop 5y agoParasitic implies one party (implied the employee?) is left worse off than otherwise. If these jobs are being accepted normally it's because the local offers are worse and the developer is not good/doesn't want to deal with the international business side (inc. finding clients, negotiating, etc). So it seems that in a free-ish market, this relationship would be strongly symbiotic, right? Interestingly in Japan they have "Key Money" and "Lock Change fee", which are two different non-refundable BS fees and they confused me initially. The key money also depends by region, with Kansai having it almost everywhere and in other areas "it depends".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- coretx 5y ago"pay peanuts get monkeys"
- bumbada 5y agoAs always you need to understand the context. It is typical for HN to bring an article, take some specific point devoid of context and raise conclusions on a different place and context. Japan is not the US, Japan is a very small country that is basically overpopulated. Not just because it is a small country, but because most of Japan is highly mountainous and building space is just in the valleys. That makes life extremely artificial there. Engineers are overworked and it is normal for them to live in the city isolated from their wife and children, in an apartment that your employer puts for you and that you just can't get on your own, something similar to health insurance in the US. The pressure is so high on just one person to sustain the family in a life that is just work and work, and social relationship with work colleagues usually imply drinking a lot, that is extremely easy to burnout. Burnout means when they try to work harder to sustain their families, they get less productivity, no more. And they risk the total collapse into anxiety crisis, depression or suicide. It looks what this man is doing is releasing pressure, and productivity increases. Japanese teams are incredible. In Japan they raise you always thinking on the team, not the individual, like in the US, and when it works, it works really well. The US, or even Europe has nothing to do with Japan environment. The freedom you have in the US is orders of magnitude higher. You don't like an employer, you just change jobs, without social stigma. Engineers could become millionaires. You can work not only in the US, but anywhere in the world speaking English for an American company, the Education system supports you instead of punishing you like in Japan. Taxes are small and population and economy grows instead of population shrinking and getting older and economy stagnating like in Japan.
- Aeolun 5y agoI like how you talk about taking things out of context, but then construct a caricature of Japan as an explanation instead. Yes, those things happen in Japan, but they’re not the norm. At least not in my experience.
- ayushchat 5y agoIt would be interesting to see how the company would have performed had he raised employees equity instead of salary? I think having equity incentivizes employees to focus more on the welfare of the company than a fixed salary. I may be wrong though
- muskox2 5y agoI think this is true, but all things being equal employees will value $1 in salary much more than $1 in equity. So to get the same impact of higher salary, you have to give a large amount of equity. There are pros and cons.
- ayushchat 5y agoyes, agreed. But increasing salary = increasing worker satisfaction at current position, not necessarily a push for future growth and subsequent stock growth Increased equity = Push employees to work for company stock growth. But yes, $1 equity is not same as $1 salary to the employees
- hattori31 5y agoHello everyone, this is my company and in the newly created dev department we are looking for Japanese speaking full-stack engineers, designers, Project managers etc based in Japan. Japanese is almost definitely needed, but may make an exception for rockstar level engineers. Remote work (inside Japan), visa support, good salary, even 1 million yen present for joining are in the package. You can find more and contact us if interested https://topics.shiftinc.jp/recruit-daae/ https://topics.shiftinc.jp/recruit-daae/
- unscaled 5y agoLooking around the internet, it seems Shift Inc. is paying around 4.5-5.0 (full range: 3.8-7.8) million JPY / year total comp. This is about 40k-45k USD/year. It's somewhat better than what engineers would get on a black companies and local consulting companies and perhaps on par with some of the traditional blue chip companies. But this doesn't come anywhere close to what a software engineer can earn on the highest paying companies here, like Google or Indeed (levels.fyi pegs Google L4 as earning 14-23 million JPY per year, though the dataset is a little bit small). Even the large local IT-focused companies are competing for talent: Yahoo, Line, Rakuten, Works Applications, Mercari etc. will all pay up to 11m-13m for non-manager software engineers (even though they won't necessarily pay much higher for entry-level engineers). Many well-funded startups are also paying 7m-10m salaries to their engineers. The pay gaps between different companies in the very same city (Tokyo) for the same position can be quite high. You can read more about it here: https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-japan-the-ultimate-guide https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-ja... In short, if Shift Inc. is paying around 5m for their engineers, it might help them fight high turnover, but it won't be enough to bring the best engineers. There are companies which are both more well-known and stable and are still paying higher salaries.
- unscaled 5y agoChecking again, their official recruitment page[1] is actually listing "example salaries": These are higher, although probably not representative: Security Engineer (in their 40s): 13 million yen Automation Architect (in their 40s): 10 million yen Q.A. Engineer (in their 30s): 9 million yen. These salaries are on par with the top paying local companies, but it's quite suspect none of them are registered on a third party site. They might be rather new. [1] https://recruit.shiftinc.jp/entry/mid_career/job/ https://recruit.shiftinc.jp/entry/mid_career/job/
- prometheus76 5y agoCompetitors: "Why is the stock in that company going up?" CEO hiding real reason: "I raised all the salaries in my company!" Other CEOs: "Even if that's the real reason, we aren't going to try that."
- ironmagma 5y agoWhy would that be a good cover story? It would make all the companies have to pay more.
- etdev 5y agoNot sure about this specific company but it's true that salaries in Japan have been increasing for tech positions. I gathered up a ton of data points to try and prove this here: https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-japan-the-ultimate-guide https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-ja... I'm also attempting to keep track of modern companies that operate in Japan and pay globally competitive salaries here: https://japan-dev.com https://japan-dev.com It's an exciting time for Japan (especially Tokyo).
- peter_d_sherman 5y ago>"Masaru Tange says the strategy that turned his company into one of Japan’s best-performing stocks may be surprising: He buys smaller firms and boosts their workers’ pay. Tange’s Shift Inc., a software tester , acquires other businesses near the bottom of the industry supply chain and raises their engineers’ salaries. He says he’s able to do this and still charge competitive prices by cutting out layers of companies that serve as middlemen in the outsourcing process. And having more workers leads to higher sales."
- maverickmax90 5y agoPlease play some AAA games from Japanese studios.
- jk20 5y agoGood deeds do get rewarded.