I'm curious what's the typical salary for devs at Japanese startups. I'm assuming it should at least be higher than megacorps which, from what I understand, are more traditional and based on years spent at the company.
I also wonder how much culture clash there are for foreigners working at these companies e.g. how do they handle conflicts or disagreements with seniority.
I’m American, my wife is Japanese, we have a young half daughter. (I also studied Japanese in college and lived here, so it would be a good culture fit for myself.) When I’ve broadly looked into working in Japan the pay seems to be better for foreign companies than domestic ones. But on the whole, I think the job opportunities are less.
A large foreign company like say Google or an international bank will pay more competitive wages than a domestic company. While startups likely have more variability in pay the same pattern holds.
I’ve seen ranges senior devs that are for approx $70k USD. That’s a huge pay cut for someone coming from the US. If you were teaching English in Japan that would be a huge step up however.
Similarly culture will be better for a foreign company than a domestic one — hours, overtime, company politics, etc. Your language ability would also be a critical factor.
Consequently, for me, it seems better to develop a career in the US and visit Japan. Now a company that is 100% remote that would allow you to live anywhere in the world and pay US wages would be an interesting opportunity.
7-8M yen is perhaps a good estimate for a foreign software developer salary, but it is really more about the company that you'll be working with than the market. There is a huge pay gap between small PHP shops paying 4M per year on a yearly contract, and companies like Google or Indeed which sometimes pay over 20M for very senior engineers.
Japan is still a buyer's market, and companies are constantly looking for engineers. It's all a matter of applying to high-paying company[1] and passing their interview. Granted, the competition for these companies is much higher, but the competition for software talent is also high.
If you can get a 15M/y salary at one of the top paying companies, you can have quite a good life in Tokyo. There is a certain fantasy of unattainable Tokyo that is perpetuated by expatriate cost of living rankings like Mercer's[1]. An American expat relocated on company expense looking to match their standard of living with a spacious 100 square meter apartment in a classy neighborhood in central Tokyo (like Roppongi or Azabu) is will go north of 400k yen per month, which is not much cheaper than what it would be in SF, I guess. If you go ahead and make sure it is fitted to US standards - with space for dish washer and standalone clothes dryer, built-in oven, and a bedroom which can fit a king-size bed - you can very well end up with a 800k per month.
But considering Tokyo's amazing public transportation system, you don't need to - and usually don't want to - live in central Tokyo. You can go to a station that's 10 minutes away by train from Shibuya or Shinjuku and pay half the price for a larger apartment or even a standalone house - or alternatively get tiny studio apartment for 60k per month.
> Now a company that is 100% remote that would allow you to live anywhere in the world and pay US wages would be an interesting opportunity.
They exist, but you don't just get free reign to work wherever you want. Most countries tax systems are not well equipped to handle international income, so you have to figure that out for every country you stay in, or try to fly under the radar and potentially commit a felony in a foreign country.
It's getting better though, with some countries starting to offer specific visas and tax options for digital nomad style living.
The price paid for labor is only tangentially related to the value of product produced. Wages are set by supply and demand, and the labor market is still very much location dependent. Companies who need local workers are forced to pay the rate required to attract and keep them, and that cost is a lot higher in some places than others.
The company doesn't pay someone in San Francisco more than someone in Kansas because the San Francisco worker has a higher cost of living, they do it because the San Francisco worker would go work for someone else for more money if they didn't. The worker in Kansas doesn't have that alternative option.
Now, as more and more companies become primarily remote employers, we will likely see the location based variance for workers diminish. However, this is likely to mean that the higher cost of living places see their wages decrease more than lower cost of living places increase.
Yeah, I think this is the point people need to recognize -- wages are about clearing costs, which relates to the value of what workers produce (if something is more valuable, people can pay more to compete for the talent to produce it). If developers were literally paid for the value of what they produce, there'd be no profits and the companies wouldn't be good vehicles for investment, wouldn't have funds for R&D, &c.
good point, they justify by saying things like 'cost of living' when in reality it's about many other things like supply/demand, need for local talent who can come to office etc etc.
What I mean is that if a company can get its software made in SF where office rent and salaries are ridiculously high and still be profitable, it means that the product they make (software in that case) delivers tons of value.
With that observation, whether the software is made in SF for one unit of cost or in a cheaper place for 1/4 unit of cost, the company sells it for the same amount and it’s profitable.
Ergo, software produced anywhere yields the same amount of money to the company. So why should people get paid less no matter where they live if they produce the same output for the company? Isnt that unfair?
I’m not talking within the US where someone could move to the higher COL city and get paid more for the same output (if it made financial sense, after living expenses etc) but about people who can’t move countries because they’ll never get a visa for instance.
How is it fair, then, that a SV engineer gets paid 200k to produce software, and her colleague in Turkey gets paid a tenth of that for the same output? It’s not because they’re producing less valuable code, the company sells the product for the same price to anyone anywhere.
But the Turkish engineer is basically told by the company that because she’s stuck there and she can’t move elsewhere, then it’s normal to get paid a tenth of her SV colleague.
Discussing social imbalances, when referring to fiscal concerns of a company in a free-market economy, isn't logical.
You're effectively complaining that capitalism isn't entirely fair. Yes? And?
You're also saying "The US is wealthy, people are paid more there, that's not fair". Yes? What's you're point?
Nothing is entirely fair. Other political and economic systems suck too. So?
Don't conflate "companies paying by a logical, sensible, fair means under a free market economy" with "Turkey is a poorer country, due to social, cultural, historical issues, and therefore, someone 1/2 a world away should help. And not help my entire country, but just give me a few random people, software engineers, more wealth."
If Turkish law, case history, employment law, market and economics was the same, then likely there would be more upward pressure on wages. In other words, the way to "fix" this, is to make Turkey a 100% clone of the US, along with all of its history, and most importantly, with the cultural outlook many have in the US.
But I bet that isn't what a lot of people in Turkey want, is it?
I wouldn’t know what Turkish people want, I’m not Turkish.
To put it another way, you’re employing an individual to make you a thing you’ll sell for 1000$, you’re paying that person 10$ because you can get away with it since they live in a poorer country. If that same person was living in the US (for instance), you’d pay them 30$ if they lived somewhere cheap or 200$ if they lived in SV. Same individual, same skills, same output, same product. The only thing that changes is where that person lives which isn’t always a free choice because visas mostly.
Framed differently, why is it fair to pay women less than men for the same job? We actually don’t think it’s fair judging from the lip service most companies pay to that issue and the laws written in a lot of countries. In that case, the personal circumstances that influence salary is sex, in what we were discussing before it’s where you live.
The male/female discussion is a massive red herring, and a load of baloney. You cannot change your born sex, not when it comes to hiring discrimination.
What we're talking about pay, relative to where you live. This is NOT discrimination, but market forces at work.
I honestly can't even understand where you're coming from. You're essentially just asking for free money here.
For people, shareholders, companies, foreign governments to hand over free money, for no other reason because you don't like how the economy works.
Yet, you didn't just agree to disagree. You threw a parting shot over the bow, then wanted to walk away.
Not very sporting, now is that?
You're saying you believe individual's rights trump company's rights. Well sure, I agree with that.
But that is an insanely broad statement, and yet you're claiming I see it differently, which really can be used to infer that I'm some sort of careless bastard.
Let's be clear. When you mentioned 'individuals', what you've meant this entire time is 'a person in a foreign country, working in software engineering".
That's it. That's the extent of your definition of 'individual'.
Any other 'individual' can go suck eggs, as far as you're concerned! You literally have thrown away all logic on living costs, not to mention you're heartlessly and carelessly disregarding all taxation!
What about all those taxes, federal, state, sales tax, gas tax, property tax, city taxes, which go to help the homeless? Those are a part of that salary too. Yet, you literally cannot understand, or refuse to get, the concept that salary pays, not just the engineer... but instead the entirety of cost to support that engineer.
People get so upset, that various governments don't help the poor, build infrastructure to help those in lower income brackets, try to make sure schools are funded, and so on.
California has crazy taxes, and a lot of that DOES go towards additional social programs. And therefore? That tax creates upward pressure on engineer salaries, which means?
Part of that wage is "high", due to that taxation. Yet you aim to use that AGAINST companies, and instead, force them to pay that SAME SALARY, without local taxation, to some guy in ... well, anywhere but the US, as you've said.
Like places with reduced human rights. Or horribly restrictive laws. Or a disregard for the rights of women, minorities, and more!
Yup, screw it all and nail a bucket to a post, just gimme gimme gimme that salary.
I’ll rephrase then: let’s agree to disagree, period.
I don’t know you, I have nothing against you personally, I just don’t wish to argue the matter further since neither of us will change their mind and we’re most likely the only ones reading at that point.
So, tu sum up: you and I see this issue differently for different reasons, neither of us is better than the other, and your point of view has as much right to be had as mine.
> housing is literally 4x or 5x or even 10x the pricing elsewhere in the US.
> Rent is easily in that category too.
> Food, fuel for your car, electricity, and literally everything including haircuts is more expensive there
It still doesn't matter. On a $200k salary in SF your post-tax income is $10667/month. If you spend $4k/month on rent (there are plenty of decent apartments and even houses if you commute a little at that price), $2000 on bills, food, your remaining salary of ~4500 usd is now still greater than a mid level engineers gross pay in the rest of the world, including most of europe.
> If base needs + retirement needs + lifestyle/fun costs go up/down, then of course pay will go up/down.
It's a balance, the causation can flow the other way, and I'm pretty sure is currently doing so. The reason SF is so inflated is because (some) people can afford it. That's why locals get angry at tech companies, because the insane wages enabled by the tech bubble have driven the price of everything up, while everyone else's wages aren't catching up.
If somehow you picked the bubble up and moved it away, there are no businesses in SF that could match the wages tech companies can, so fewer in SF could afford the inflated prices and they would drop back down to meet the wages that people are now getting.
You can see the same thing happen when foreign housing investment is unregulated, and people with far more money than the community they're buying in purchase homes and push the market way up. People who live within the economic bounds of the community the houses are in can't afford it.
I'd say $60k-$80k are for mid-level in Japan (US "senior") and $80-$100k are for senior in Japan (US "staff"-"principal"). In Japan you don't consider someone senior after 3-4 years working. Most of my mid-level dev friends working locally make in the $60k-$80k range, and I know 3 senior devs making $100k+ (I work for a US startup so I am excluding myself).
The longest open jobs in public boards are unsurprisingly those devs don't want because they pay too little. So if you try to estimate pay based on those boards I'd say you are under-estimating it.
> Seems better to develop a career in the US and visit Japan
There's another school of thought here; there's actually a lot of value that you could bring by emphasizing the fact that you can act as a bridge between foreign engineers and japanese ones.
What is the buying power equivalent of however many yen $70k USD is? Is that enough to have an acceptable lifestyle? I understand that the Japanese housing market is drastically different from the US, such that rent is a much lower proportion of one's total income in Japan than is typical in the US. Does that translate into $70k being a good salary, relatively speaking, in Japan?
I wish I had actual statistics, but I can say from experience working and living in Tokyo, $70k USD will get you quite far. Average full-time salary in Tokyo is about $45k USD. Rent and food are generally cheaper than cities in the United States, and companies will often pay for employees to commute by train / bus. Owning a car is not a prerequisite to working, unlike most places in the United States.
Can you live on $70k? Yes. You will likely live in a small-ish apartment and not save that much. At least to me, at $70k I felt like a failure in Tokyo. A lot of things go into that feeling.
1. Not being able to afford what I considered a "nice" apartment. Like say as nice as the one I was living in before I cam in So Cal with 2 bedrooms, a nice living room, 2 bathrooms, etc. Those apartments exist. They're probably $2500 a month a few stops out of downtown. If you move way out they can get way cheaper but then you aren't downtown.
2. Having "finance" jobs and corresponding lifestyle in front of my face. Before I moved to Japan I thought I was doing well (never compared). Once I got here, at least at the time, the English free magazines around town are all targeting expats in finance. Those people, at the time, made $300k to $1000k a year and live in $4k to $20k a month apartments provided by their comapany so their salary is even higher. At $70k I don't I can justify spending more than about $1400 a month on an apartment.
That said, if I was just out of college, even at $40k-$50k I think I'd have thought things were pretty good. In other words, "it depends" on what you find acceptable. I took a big step down in lifestyle to live here at the time.
I feel your pain. A lot of people make sacrifices for the novelty and mystique of Japan. For a short period it’s an acceptable trade for the experience but I don’t think it’s a great long term decision.
Decent apartments can be had for as low as ~ $ 700-800 (companies housing is often subsidized even further), however they are typically quite small. A decent house in the less swanky areas of Tokyo's 23 districts runs about $ 0.5 M IIRC.
Food costs about the same - a ramen is about ~400-500 円 (~ a Chipotle burrito ?), and food at restaurants would cost about the same as the US. Groceries, and Electronics cost slightly higher. Finding Vegan/Vegetarian food is like coming across an Oasis in a desert.
Nevertheless, Japan is a far more interesting place.
Like many things, it depends. The housing is different in the senses that if you want to live in a “walkable” area close to public transportation etc. then almost all areas for this description. In the US I think there’s a small pocket of areas like this where the costs are high then drop off dramatically when you move to the suburbs. So in Tokyo you have more choice where to live.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned is the role of women. While many more women work there are still barriers, discrimination and the cultural tendency for women to be full time mothers/housewives. So $70k is household income.
Lastly, one needs to take time into consideration. A couple hours on the train commuting and a couple hours of overtime can add up to long days. So on a $ per hour basis it might not be that good.
I’m always baffled by this kind of comments. The world isn’t made of SV engineers making 300K$/year, living in appartment with 5K appartment and buying 40$ sandwiches. Sure, most places and jobs are paying less, but cost of living is also lower. In Japan for instance eating out is cheap compared to Europe. Healthcare is accessible too. Cooking can help saving money too. Heck, I’m living (alone) fine with $16K/year (yes, per year) in one of the biggest Japanese city and I still can go to parties, buy video games, travel abroad while saving some money.
He asked that in the "aren’t you all living in the streets of Japan with so few money?" in a humble-bragging tone that is quite common here when speaking of wages in an international context. And my reply is clear: yes it’s more than doable if living alone. I won’t speak for people who have families, it may be harder, but none of my foreign friends working here ever complained about their salaries.
Nah. He just asked how far it goes because it's not obvious how much you'd have to spend if you aren't willing to live in a shoebox. Seeing as most of the housing stock in big Japanese cities are the shoebox size apartments.
Another thing which a foreigner would have a hard time finding out is how much you have to spend on decent domestic staff or private tutors.
They could look up English speaking companies serving the Anglo expat market, but the local middle class is likely able to get those services for dramatically different prices.
Did I say "acceptable" means "equivalent to $300k in the Bay Area?" No. Far from it. There's a big gap between $300k per year and "acceptable," even in SF.
> I’ve seen ranges senior devs that are for approx $70k USD. That’s a huge pay cut for someone coming from the US. If you were teaching English in Japan that would be a huge step up however.
For comparison, an L5-L6 at Amazon or the equivalent would make something similar in India. Japan for some reason hasn't valued Software as much as Hardware (a race it's also losing), despite having successes with the Playstation etc.
Exceptions abound, but in general software development jobs even at smaller studios pay a lot less in Japan than in the US.
In Tokyo you'd expect to make around 400,000 yen a month, which is about $3500 a month. That sounds nice until you see that a 400sqft apartment with no bedrooms can cost 100,000 yen or more. A one bedroom can hit 150,000 - 200,000 yen in a nice area with convenient access to train stations.
Edit: the website linked has good statistics on this:
Notably, "this 2018 survey conducted by the Japanese government found that the average "System Engineer" (a roughly analogous position to a software developer) in Japan had 12 years of experience and an annual compensation of ¥5.5 million."
I live and work in Tokyo, this is pretty accurate. Of course you can also work on a scale of increasing commute time in order to decrease rent or increase housing size.
Companies typically pay your commuting fees so it's an attractive option for some who don't mind riding trains for awhile.
Pretty much anywhere with a 10 minute walking distance to the Yamanote line will set you back about the numbers I've mentioned. You can of course go far out of your way and pay half as much, if you don't mind a very long commute each way to work. I would not recommend it given how crowded Japan's trains get during rush hour.
You can go quite a bit farther out than Yamanote without increasing your commute by much. I once lived in Ota ward
with a daily commute to Nihombashi. Door-to-door commute time was 25 minutes. Not too much worse than a 10-15 minute commute, especially when I can read / reply to emails on the way.
It's fascinating to me hearing about how Hong Kong and Tokyo have similar cost of living to even some of the most expensive metros in the US, but the pay isn't as competitive. It makes me wonder why the market hasn't adjusted (by people moving to smaller cities, pay raises, etc).
Like others have mentioned, the US pays it's developers like royalty because they are a key fuel in the tech bubble. In a playground full of millionares and billionaires developers are an enabling piece of the puzzle.
The rest of the world doesn't have such extreme market forces, and there are even subsets of the software market in the US that also can't afford to pay at that level because they have more traditional business models.
You could say wages for devs in the US are more closely tied to the value they provide to the tech bubble and it's inflated economics, not the value they provide to society in traditional business models.
This is also why there are more "family owned" style small software companies in the rest of the world. A single SV wage would be more than some companies yearly revenue.
Switzerland developers salaries are the same or higher than US. You get a much better standard of living, 5 weeks vacation minimum, paid overtime (all time worked is logged and checked by the govt so it is paid), a pension.
Just putting this here for people to know it might be an option. I certainly wish I knew sooner. Visa can be tricky though, if you’re not at least an EU citizen (or better yet, married to a Swiss), it’ll tough getting a visa. And I’d you’re American, no bank will touch you with a ten foot pole.
I’d say it’s very good. I don’t know about Zürich where rent is higher but overall it works out pretty well considering the overall package: much better employment insurance (1-2 years at 80% of your salary, including if you quit), vacation (5 weeks minimum by law + statutory holidays), health insurance (healthcare is not cheap here compared to Germany or France or Italy but the max deductible allowed for policies is 2500/year/adult), paid overtime (again, by law), 1-3 months notice period when quitting or laying off, and companies (generally) aren’t as trigger happy: if they hire you it’s not to fire you as soon as the wind changes. Oh and parental leave by law (don’t know the specifics).
That’s my understanding, if I made a mistake please correct me.
Yes food costs more, so does clothing etc. But taxes aren’t suuuper high in my opinion (around 20-30% with health insurance paid separately), VAT is 7.7%, and you can get anywhere by train for quite cheap (super saver tickets let you go across Switzerland for 20 francs, if you plan a bit ahead).
The caveat is that unless you have an EU passport or marry a Swiss, it’s almost impossible to get a work visa. And if you’re a US citizen, there is no bank that will want to take you as a customer.
Banks are a big employer but there are also insurance companies. I’m joking, these two are big but there are startups as well, consultancies, big entreprise type of jobs, etc.
I live in Hong Kong. We have 0% capital gains tax, 0% dividend tax and my effective income tax is around 5%. Many people get this down to 0% by getting married, having kids, giving money to their parents, offsetting against mortgage interest payments etc. Healthcare is a lot cheaper than in the US too. Living here is definitely workable.
Adding to that, most people live with their family until they get married in their early thirties and over half of the permanent resident population live in very heavily subsidised public housing.
> It's fascinating to me hearing about how Hong Kong and Tokyo have similar cost of living to even some of the most expensive metros in the US
It's truly fascinating because I've never seen a city in Japan that costs anywhere near as much as some podunk local economic hub in the US, yet I hear these "it's too expensive" stories all the time.
My combined monthly expenses in a city--rent, food, and everything--comes to maybe $1200. My mind is blown whenever I hear people say they're struggling to pay for things or life is too expensive. The main thing I've noticed is most of these people are going to bars/izakaya several times a week, and it's easy to spend $50+ for a small meal and some beers there. I know people in Tokyo making far less than Western wages but still living very comfortably.
But in-city rent in Japan doesn't even approach a typical 500k population city in the US , unless you're insisting on living in the middle of the most in demand parts of Shibuya or something.
Lol, I have a couple friend, 3 kids, living in Los Altos, they said combined they think they make $800k a year. They can't afford to live their !?!?!?!?!?
It's because people in Tokyo often participate in work or work related activities in their free time.
Many "perks" are provided by companies, this includes dinners, drinks tax breaks on your company housing etc.
The vast majority of people who are employed in Japan are also part of a family, which is their company. Your company even sends you for health checkups and they know the results of said checkups. If you're overweight, they'll make you go lose it etc.
Even peoples managers or the companies president will come speak at an employees wedding.
We have the same issue in Canada as well. Toronto and Vancouver, our two most expensive cities, have salaries below many other cities while having some of the highest housing costs.
It's not Canada or Japan or UK that is special, it's the US. If you imagine US tech salary levels are normal, you would come to the conclusion that the entire rest of the world underpays their developers. But at that point, wouldn't it be more accurate to say other countries' salaries ought to be what defines 'normal' and US salaries are the exceptional case, not the other way around?
Well 25% of salary for rent, sounds ok. You need to adapt a little to the culture, generally the bedding is put in a big cupboard and the room converted daily. Get some nice tatami mats and enjoy.
The job security is on a different level though. Also, I suspect real estate around Tokyo, albeit inflated since the '80s, is not as bad as London, because attractiveness of the city is significantly restricted at the cultural level (London attracts loads of people from everywhere, Tokyo mostly attracts "only" the Japanese).
Tokyo real estate prices have been pretty much flat for the last two decades despite population growing 50%. That’s not an accident. They work hard to make it affordable for people to move there, just like in the UK they work hard on ensuring house prices and rents go up. Governments get the housing market they want to get, based on the priorities they have.
This, so much. We have the same problem in Sweden. It was amazing how easy getting an apartment in Tokyo is. If you want to rent in my Swedish town your best bet is having parents put you on a waitlist when you are born, which a lot did.
Buying is of course easy if you have the money, and it’s all governmental regulation causing it.
I'll trust his higher end estimate of 16+ years netting you 11 million yen, but I've never seen a job posting anywhere near that even for senior engineers. And even if that is the case, 11 million yen is still far below a FAANG salary with equivalent experience.
I also have not seen many vacancies advertised at that level. But I suspect there are roles for people with the right experience. The roles are getting filled by recruiters approaching already employed people.
My guess is a very experienced developer that speak English and Japanese can get base salaries above ¥10m at FAANG in Tokyo. So probably ¥15m with bonus and RSUs is obtainable.
Ten minutes is considered the breaking point for most people in Tokyo, the rent prices will drop after the apartments are further away from a train station that that.
There are so many factors. I agree a 10 minutes walk might be considered far. Me though, for example, according to Google Maps I'm 20 mins from the 3 different stations (so not sure which one is closest) but I live just off a major street with 12 bus lines and I only live 2 mins from the bus stop. There's a bus every ~2 min so I can get to the station they're all going to usually in 6-8 minutes total travel time (though I haven't ridden train or taken the bus since March). Many stations also have bike parking garages and you can get a monthly space so your 10-20 minute walk could be a 5-10 minute bike ride.
>I also wonder how much culture clash there are for foreigners working at these companies e.g. how do they handle conflicts or disagreements with seniority.
Can't speak for startups but megacorps started in the last 10 years tend to be pretty chill places to work with good pay and perks. My current team is managed by a foreigner and there's a 50/50 split between local and foreign engineers. I haven't personally had any issues attributable to culture, they can still happen but you tend to have to go looking for them.
Japanese employee to employer relationships are like working in a normal corporate environment however there is no negotiation and the raises are small. The trade-off is their decent salaries and you have stable employment.
Your question is too broad, but to give at least one data point: a data science dev with a few years of experience (1 to 5), can expect between ¥6M and ¥12M/year in a startup.
> it should at least be higher than megacorps
Yes, with exceptions
> how much culture clash there are for foreigners
In my subjective and limited experience, not much. Start-ups in Japan are rare (compared to most tech cities), Japanese founders/employees often do not want to emulate the working culture of big companies, on the contrary they might work in a startup to avoid it. Knowledge of English and living abroad experience also seem more common than average
tbh I do understand the need for a license. I wish something like this were implemented in UK with a mandatory knowledge requirement for the recruiter about the field they are recruiting in. This would save all parties wasted time and travel.
I have been in situations when "the agent" sent me to a pharma lab to interview for a purchasing role when I used to do purchasing in the constructions industry.
In the UK, recruiters actually used to be licensed, but this requirement was largely removed in the 1970s. In researching my other article on recruiting in Japan (https://www.tokyodev.com/2020/10/01/recruiting-in-japan/), I discovered that there was a movement globally to move to ban, or at least license, private recruiting world wide as part of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. The concern then was more that recruiters could be quite shady, to the point that it was sometimes hard to distinguish them from human traffickers.
Licensing in Japan at least is isn't about ensuring the recruiter has knowledge of the field. Rather, it is to ensure that they meet privacy requirements and are not a fly-by-night business. They include having a minimum amount of assets, have a physical office with a separate room to interview candidates, and appointing a "privacy representative" who has completed a training seminar.
Personally, I think trying to ensure that a recruiter has knowledge of a field would be quite challenging to do via licensing, especially in an area like tech where the field evolves so rapidly.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this has more to do with recruiting agencies that take south-east asians and take them to out of country to work in disreputable establishments. Think sweatshops and prostitution, when promised to work in a high-end resort. It’s extremely easy to take advantage of people when they are out of their home country.
By regulating the industry it keeps bad actors out, but I’d think it’d be very unlikely to improve the recruitment process quality; the common knowledge is that less regulation leads to... well whatever those people are selling these days.
I’m generally anti regulation. Shouldn’t we teach people to question what they read in addition to how to read? This places a bias on personal liberty.
Regulation and licensing introduces change. There’s no stipulation whether the change is positive or negative, and to again make a change once it’s set generally requires lobbyists and lots of money in the US.
Having worked in NYC with union workers I have witnessed how easily it can be abused.
Is there any reason why we want to double down on this model? Are we all so blind fed by outrage and/or social media we accept emotions instead of debate?
These are the kinds of things I want to see. The human fallacy is known and quantified, although, as far as I know it’s abused / exploited instead of providing neutral
ground for policy discussion.
This seems like a problem that could be solved by a professional association rather than regulation. The association could advertise the competence of, and impose quality standards on its members.
Typically the first step there is a law that allows the professional association to self-regulate, including the ability for that association to take legal action against those who do such work without a license.
A professional association can also act as a simple indicator of quality, and encourage people to use membership as a screening tool. Something similar is commonly seen in tech fields with certifications; no law requires them, but they help in getting certain kinds of jobs, and they help employers screen potential hires for a certain competence floor.
It's interesting he says that the guidelines "aren't the easiest thing to read." I'm a native English speaker and non-native Japanese speaker and I've found that it's far easier for me to go straight to the source with Japanese legal documents, including guidelines like these and even the actual text of the law.
I guess it's a cultural thing, but they're always written extremely clearly with basic grammar and everyday vocabulary, almost making it feel elementary if you're used to the English way of writing legal text as abstruse as possible.
Well, potentially it can if you aren't following the regulations, and it is classified as recruiting. For instance, if your job board recommends sends recommendations to individuals to apply to a certain job based on their profile, even if this is automated, it is potentially going to be considered as recruiting, thus requiring a license. For this reason, some of the major Japanese recruiting platforms, such as Wantedly, which offers a LinkedIn like social network around job hunting, has obtained a recruitment license, though they aren't doing what we would traditionally think of as recruitment.
People need food to eat; that doesn't mean that food regulations are wrong. People need healthcare to remain healthy instead of not dead; that doesn't mean medical licensing is bad.
I have no idea whether these particular regulations for recruiters make sense or not, but just because something is fundamental to living doesn't mean regulating it is automatically a bad idea.
I disagree with the premise that regulations are necessary. They're bandage patch solutions.
Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US.
About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information.
Regulations exist to prevent abuse. If companies couldn't get away with abusing their customers (without going bankrupt), we wouldn't need regulations in the first place.
In any case, large corporations which essentially have immunity from the law usually find clever ways to work around the regulations without fixing the underlying problem.
A better solution would be to stop propping up big corporations with infinite fiat currency; big corporations are riddled with blind spots and they are devoid of any sense of accountability due to inherent flaws in the concept of corporate personhood; big corporations are not meant to exist and they wouldn't exist if not for all that free fiat which is creating an artificial anti-competitive moat around them. Competition and churn is necessary for a proper functioning capitalist system.
Our current monetary system is all about propping up zombie corporations by giving them unlimited free money which allows them to get away with everything.
The way our economy works now is basically like a son who is CEO and who keeps getting caught doing drugs and getting in trouble and then rich daddy keeps bailing them out over and over again and then bribing journalists to keep quiet so that nobody finds out... Regulations are the equivalent of sending the son to rehab; except it's all a PR stunt and the son will be back to doing drugs and causing problems within a few weeks. The solution is to fire the spoiled brat and let someone else do the job; someone who is passionate about it and can do it right.
Supply-side economics have distorted the way people think about the economy. Instead of figuring out what consumers need and working backwards from that, companies are constantly trying to figure out how to use up all available resources (e.g. capital, people, raw materials) and then resorting to advertising to convince consumers that they need whatever it is that they ended up producing. It's madness. All the talk about 'product-market fit' is delusional; it's mostly about fitting the customer to the product than the other way around. Advertising and A/B testing is not about improving the product to fit the user, it's about manipulating the user to buy the product.
> Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US.
This doesn't prove anything. One can always cherry-pick and refute certain peripheral points but that doesn't address the core premise of the argument. The only way to disprove such argument wold be exhaustively and that is simply not possible.
For example, just off the top of my head, I can think of one aspect which was not mentioned; the number of years of training that are required to become a doctor; this is in itself a limiting factor which reduces the number of applicants and therefore graduates. Do doctors need so many years of training; who decides that? Maybe they could specialize sooner and still yield excellent results? Another aspect would be cost; it's likely that the high costs of education themselves are limiting the number of applicants.
Unfortunately, these types of debates are always going to end up being a case of trusting authority versus trusting your own critical thinking (and common sense). Showing a bunch of arbitrary data doesn't mean anything unless you can prove that all the relevant aspects have been covered exhaustively and this never happens in practice. In practice, the main use of data is to lend credence to profitable narratives.
The foundation of our modern economy is to draw attention towards convenient facts and suppress inconvenient ones even when both are true and equally relevant.
> About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information.
Absent regulation, how do you expect consumers to know about chemicals used in the product? We didn't get those nutrition facts and ingredients labels out of the grace of the manufacturers.
>> Absent regulation, how do you expect consumers to know about chemicals used in the product?
The internet. If corporations were not hoarding up all the money and media and censoring critics, we would have many competing services which would allow us to do quick and accurate product lookups.
> Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US
Perhaps! But how about having reasonable requirements instead of ridiculous ones?
> About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage.
Incredible. Do you really believe it's possible to make a safe food market without regulations?
> Regulations exist to prevent abuse. If companies couldn't get away with abusing their customers (without going bankrupt), we wouldn't need regulations in the first place.
What on Earth will make a company selling, fake protein, which is actually poisonous melamine, to go out of business? They got paid before anyone ate the poisoned food, and really, there are no regulations, so what are you suing them for? What did they do wrong?
Must you trust a large, well marketed brand name or else worry about fly-by-night manufacturers making a quick buck on adultered goods and then dissapearing? Are trademark regulations still enforced in this "no regulations" world or if the counterfeit is close enough that you can't tell the difference then caveat emptor?
Every libertarian secretly _loves_ regulations, as long as they get to choose which. "Enforce property rights because I have property" or "Enforce nothing because I already have guns and that makes me the enforcer".
> People need healthcare to remain healthy instead of not dead; that doesn't mean medical licensing is bad.
In the US, you can legally go see a chiropractor (100% nonsense quackery), but getting $2 of antibiotics generally costs upward of $100 just for the office visit.
I wouldn't personally be using this model of an example of a working system.
Licensing systems frequently (usually?) do more harm than good. Look at optometry licensing and prescription control in the US, for example: it's 100% price fixing and protectionism. Same with hairdressers.
TulliusCicero says that regulation in general isn't automatically a bad idea. You're giving specific examples of purportedly bad regulation, which doesn't challenge the point that there exists some potential system of regulation for these industries that is better than no regulation.
I live in Germany, and while the healthcare problems here aren't as severe as in the US, there is still the issue of people (and at least some insurance) accepting homeopathic 'medicine'.
If you have a difficult to treat condition doctors will completely ignore you, blame you, or just give you anti-depressants.
Some conditions have diagnosis times 5-10+ years. For me it took 20 years of asking. Then 3 years of dozens of visits to get answers.
At a certain point people give up and look elsewhere. Communities are friendlier. Certain things like diet changes or supplements can help.
Unfortunately it’s also were the crystal healers hang out.
This might vary between countries. Chiropractors here have a protected title (like doctors, lawyers), and a 5 year regulated training that isn’t exactly homeopathy. I rarely notice any difference between the surgeon general-approved naprapathy practitioners, and chiropractors. They do mostly similar treatment and charge similar money for it.
I have never seen any new-agy or pseudoscience-like stuff come up in treatments. They just snap my spine into place and some times rough up a muscle just to prevent it snapping back out of location again.
I too have heard people say it’s pseudoscience and humbug (usually e.g in the US) but could this vary? What are the pseudoscience parts? Could loose regulation in some countries have led to it becoming a market for pseudoscience whereas in other places it hasn’t?
Chiropractors are 100% quackery with zero basis in reality.
The entire field was based entirely on the idea that all diseases were caused by lesions of the nervous system (called subluxations) therefore all diseases could be cured by manipulation of the spine.
Back pain related therapy in general is filled with “qualified” people ready to dole out “treatments” in exchange for money, including MD surgeons who do back surgery.
The problem is succinctly explained in this clip, starting at 2min:
As the video says, we’re using a clothesline as a flagpole. Other than squats, deadlifts, and core workouts, keeping your weight low, and avoiding work that stresses the back, I doubt there’s real solution, and even those are probably just pushing the back pain into the future. It’s probably inevitable as you get older.
In America chiropractors claim to treat diabetes, etc.
It was invented by a guy who practiced healing with magnets and said that a ghost taught him about spinal adjustments - it has always been pseudoscientific nonsense. There may well be places that have extracted only the meaningful parts, but I’d be skeptical.
In fact, historically Chiropractors were strongly opposed to vaccination because they believed that all diseases were caused by lesions of the nervous system (subluxations), so vaccines couldn't possibly work to prevent disease.
Honestly, "They just snap my spine into place and some times rough up a muscle just to prevent it snapping back out of location again." sounds pretty suspicious to me. What does "snap my spine into place" mean, exactly? Were you literally paralyzed or handicapped in some way until they did this thing?
Muscles "snapping out of location"? How does that work?
I just mean the extremely common condition when you have one or more thoracic vertebra that ”feels” out of place (As I understand it, it’s not -it’s just a muscular thing). Typically due to stiff muscles surrounding it. Muscles aren’t out of location. Muscles are tense near the spine, causing pain and stiffness.
The area is easily seen/felt with a finger on the spine near where the issue is.
Apart from pain it can give a sensation of tension or a feeling you can’t take deep breaths.
The diy fix is having someone lift you from behind as you exhale (a snap-crackle-pop sound will be heard), or rolling with your back on a foam cylinder.
I thought almost everyone, at least those with desk jobs and not enough excercise had this issue occasionally. I go to either a chiro or a naprapathy person to sort it. And as I said they do the same thing or very similar.
The same authority that certifies doctors certifies these people, so it’s literally under the surgeon general’s oversight. Which is why I think they basically have to practice something very similar to naprapathy, and can’t make claims to treat anything but the areas actually treated. Basically back muscles.
Japan also has some of the worst job satisfaction and work happiness in the developed world. (I googled "Japanese job satisfaction" and the trope of the overworked Japanese salaryman seems to check out.)
Restricting the job seeking/information process (something that should be completely open) can't possibly be helping out.
Perfect information about all jobs available to you would surely be ideal for worker happiness by helping you find a job you hate the least.
While Japan has great national health insurance, you still have to pay 30% of it. So a month supply of Concerta will still cost you $100, which is a lot better than in the US without insurance, but it's not free.
What's nice are the yearly comprehensive medical checkups, what's not nice is your employer pays for it and gets a copy of the results too.
Japan has monthly and yearly caps, as well as discounts for chronic diseases and for people with low or no income. So while it's true that you pay 30% yourself, the people who would have difficulty paying that 30% are also taken care of.
They also have debt of about 200% of GDP, with a quickly diminishing population, that's a very bad situation. High debt levels are understandable during eras of rapidly increasing productivity but not otherwise.
It's a giant, very well manicured, thoughtfully attended 'house of cards'.
But none of this means that job boards necessarily need to be regulated.
Montana has an unemployment rate of 3% and very few homeless as well, very stable economy.
Worse, Japan's bonds were 'backed' by its manufacturing industry - much like US ones are 'backed' by its tech and military. S.Korea and China are eating Japan's lunch; this can't be good for the country.
In other countries -- the US for instance -- we have restrictions on connecting jobs to people. We prohibit, for example, job boards that are explicitly designed to favor (or be exclusive to) members of one race. Even if there are a lot of employers and employees who would appreciate such a service.
If you don't think THOSE rules are wrong, then are you REALLY sure you want to criticize how Japan chooses to organize their own approach to the topic? They have chosen to license the people who do the connecting rather than introduce legal liability for those who discriminate (and are sloppy enough about it to leave enough evidence to prevail in court).
I'm not saying control of discrimination is the reason that Japan licenses job recruitment, but I DO think that it requires a more thoughtful and open-minded approach that asks more about the benefits gained before dismissing out of hand the approach of requiring a license.
Whenever you see pointless licensing it's usually a symptom of union or cartel like behavior used to limit supply by limiting access to the old boys club. If I were part of a union I would want to limit access to that union so that the supply stays low and my salary stays high. So you can think of what's going on in japan as a sort of recruiting union formed to keep out the rif raff and keep wages artificially high.
Licensing does have a very good side however and that side is that it guarantees that the holder of a license jumped through the right educational hoops to get that license. For example nobody wants to get treated by an unlicensed quack doctor... so it's a case by case situation whether or not something should be regulated.
Doctors are also a good example of the other side of the coin when regulation starts to produce a cartel where doctor supply is throttled. There's no other country that makes MD licensing harder to achieve than the US and by sheer coincidence doctors in the US are also one of the highest paid in the world. Also ask any doctor, they will tell you that 4 years of unrelated undergrad that includes all chemistry up to organic chemistry is all useless to the actual job along with the majority of stuff they learn in med school as well.
Sorry for the unrelated rant on doctors but it's actually a very common phenomenon and is basically exactly what is happening here for recruitment in japan.
As a distinction between a communications service, and a "head hunting" service, I'm at least initially optimistic about regulation of professionals in this domain being a possibly good thing. Like how CPAs and Lawyers and Doctors are regulated. Though some of those regulations might go a bit too far towards monopoly power rather than quality and protection for consumers (and could thus use some market reforms).
Seems like jobs boards in the US which imply a preference or prejudice based upon race, color, religion, sex or national origin would be a Title VII violation and subject any employee advertising on such boards to sanctions. Yet you’ll find web sites such as blackjobs.com with fbi.gov as the first post.
I also wonder how much culture clash there are for foreigners working at these companies e.g. how do they handle conflicts or disagreements with seniority.