Looking 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. I

Looking 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.