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日本語を知っていますか？ Not to be nosy, but could you go into some detail about how you ended up in Japan of all places? :) I find intrigue with any "developer turned en

• patio11 18y ago
  This may sound like a mini-rant, if so my apologies in advance: I work at a software company in central Japan. On a day to day basis Japan is a lot like England, with rather less white people and much more expensive cheese. The language is a language, the people are people, the business challenges are business challenges, and it is all rather less exotic than people make it out to be. But I get the "of all places" vibe a lot whereas I don't think I'd get it if I worked for a big ol' publicly traded firm in London. Its not exactly rocket science getting a job here. We have big freaking companies which do lots of business with international customers. This is sort of a necessary prerequisite for being an economy of Japan's size. Many of these companies have significant need for IT. The percentage of local engineers who can speak English is truly abysmal -- not quite as bad as the number of American engineers who can speak Japanese, but its still far below the requirements of industry. So when you need an English-speaking engineering services, how do you get it? The same way Japan gets every other resource they can't make locally: buy it from abroad. Step one to getting a job as a professional here: achieve proficiency in the Japanese language, where proficiency means "I can read a design document written in Japanese and extract the business requirements from it, then defend my implementation choices in oral Japanese to my colleagues" and not "I watched anime and learned some phrases すごいよね". Sidenote from my personal version of hell: Imagine the worst tech interview you have ever participated in. Now imagine that the interviewee has less working vocabulary than a second grader. Now imagine he is damned proud of it. Its difficult but a lot less impossible than routinely made out to be. I recommend studying at university, if you have the opportunity. Step 2: Network. This primarily consists of figuring out a way to get your business card into the hands of someone who will be asked the question "Do you know of any engineers who speak English?" The ROI on a set of $20 bilingual business cards is truly stupendous. There are hundreds of Japanese companies with business in America, hundreds of American companies with business in Japan, and tens of thousands of people routinely flying between the two countries on business. These might be good folks to chat up. You have a built-in edge because people who are bilingual in English and Japanese are rare and people who are bilingual AND can perform as developers are as rare as hen's teeth. Technical skill is also a requirement, obviously, for engineers -- exactly what technical skill depends on the particular industry and company's requirements are. I'm hired to write CRUD apps for universities, not to work for some amorphous Japan, Inc. The most popular developer job in my town, on the other hand, is writing embedded software for cars. Their technical requirements are not my technical requirements.
• rgrieselhuber 18y ago
  It's kind of a long story but basically we moved here for family reasons. I'm building essentially an enterprise SaaS company, but building my first customer base here in Japan.