Carmakers Are Learning Japan’s Tech Talent Doesn’t Come Cheap | Hacker News Reader

Carmakers Are Learning Japan’s Tech Talent Doesn’t Come Cheap

bloomberg.com

112 pointsarcanus158 comments

Very funny quote: “You’ve got some engineers making 20 million yen ($170,000) a year. Then you try to fit them in the traditional manufacturer-based salary structure where it should be 7 to 9 million yen.”

Clearly they don't understand the market, if the other parts of the market are paying 20Million Yen for this position then that is where it "should be" and you have to figure out how to cover that cost.

I get really tired of companies saying "Talent Shortage" when they really mean "I don't want to pay that much."

The creation of the typical Japanese "salaryman infrastructure" has prevented any kind of flexibility in their jobs market. I'd love to actually live there for a decent amount of time if it didn't mean making x5 less my salary in the US doing the same work.

It's my understanding that the base salary in Japan, for a salaryman at a large company, severely understates effective compensation. From patio11's classic (to me) post:

>...a Japanese CEO might have a salary of 4x that of his youngest salaryman. However, he also drives a $200k car. It is not "his" car, it is the company's car, but aside from the name on the title you could be excused for not knowing that.

>...My salary was $30k, but there is some tangible value in having a pocket full of business cards which practically read "Attention, person who has just been handed this card: give the bearer whatever he wants. We're good for it. If you don't, we will remember." That status is very much not the same as the one you get if you combine two part-time jobs into the same level of income.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576008

Yeah, I'd rather have my perks in cash. And not have to "work" until late hours for a façade

Me too, but we do have to remember that that's probably because we were raised in societies that don't value these perks over cash. In societies where that is not the case, non-monetary perks can be many many times more valuable than abstract cash.

In a previous life I was a weapons engineering officer in a western Navy. Sure, some sailors made more money when they were deployed versus me when I was on a shore assignment. But in situations from calm arguments to shouting down agressive drunk sailors, I had the upper hand just due to my rank. Even if I was wrong! Culture is a powerful thing, and it's there whether you think it's important or not.

> Me too, but we do have to remember that that's probably because we were raised in societies that don't value these perks over cash. In societies where that is not the case, non-monetary perks can be many many times more valuable than abstract cash.

Societies don't value things: they force people to pretend to value things. "Society values X" is only a valuable figure of speech as long as it actually approximates, "People in society freely value X for their own publicly understood reasons."

what is money?

Hey, I don't know if you'll appreciate my little crusade, but:

It's best to use a fraction when talking about a reduction in amount, and a multiplier if you're talking about an increase.

For example "one fifth my salary" would be a reduction, "5x my salary" indicates a tremendous increase. Five "times" your current salary.

Carry on and Happy New Year

Well, I appreciate your little crusade, as the original statement was unparseable. I allow for a little ESL when I run across such things, and I get the idea, but the statement might as well have been "a lot less than I make now" for all the sense it made.

I like "5x less" as a shorthand for saying you have to apply 1/5. There's something pleasing about the idea that you don't need to change your sentence structure to say something is less rather than more, and I think in this case the intent was perfectly clear.

Usually shorthand is shorter than the alternative, but not so when comparing "5x less" to "1/5".

You would likely need to say "1/5 as much" to be grammatically and semantically correct. It doesn't flow as nicely.

"1/5" is a drop in replacement. This isn't a hard thing to do. I've seen small children do it with ease.

Yeah that annoyed me. I would have used 20%. The other case is when somebody uses % for something greater than unity, eg 500% instead of 5x.

Further with the percentages: "200% more" is not "2x" but many seem to write like that. "200% more" would be twice as much (200%) MORE than already existing (100%) for a final value of three times (300%) the original value.

"x5 less my salary" means what you think it means.

If he's making $100000 a year, he'll make x - x * 5, this is, he'll have to pay his employer $400000 a year.

This is clever though by this interpretation he will make 5 times (implied) [his salary], less his salary. Totalling four times present salary. Quite some trouble.

> Clearly they don't understand the market, if the other parts of the market are paying 20Million Yen for this position then that is where it "should be" and you have to figure out how to cover that cost.

Or figure out how to get along without it, or with less of it.

As I was reading this article, I kept wondering if cars really need all the IT/SW tech being poured into them.

Maybe people wouldn't buy cars without it. Or maybe people who currently don't buy or otherwise use cars would be attracted to a simpler and cheaper solution.

A safe frame, seatbelts and airbags, reliability, reasonable gas mileage and honest pollution controls, plus a good enough radio/stored music player, and a warranty. We already have all that, to a mostly excellent degree. No additional IT talent required.

It seems that car manufacturers have trapped themselves into being feature whores.

> It seems that car manufacturers have trapped themselves into being feature whores.

That's because customers are feature whores. If there are two cars and one has a backup camera, internet connection, and an automatic transmission, people are going to buy that over a car with just a radio and a stick shift.

For the vast majority of drivers, a car is an appliance and any appliance that is easier and more comfortable to operate is better to them. So when a car can park itself, call the ambulance if you crash, keep your coffee hot in heated cupholders, and tap into your cloud music account, all the better for them.

> customers are feature whores

Yeah... or maybe because those features are now required by law:

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/u-s-requiring-back-up-cam...

AFAIK, only back-up cameras (in 2017) and airbags are required in the US. Traction control might be on the list to become required.

ABS, brake-assist/auto-braking, blind-spot detection, lane-keeping, etc are all optional.

And, FWIW, my latest car has most of these features not because I'm a feature whore, but because safety is good. And inexpensive (relative to a life-altering collision).

That's a law going into the effect over a year from now. Backup cameras have been popular long before the Feds decided to mandate it. The point is that plenty of people pay extra of their own volition to have stuff like backup cameras, blindspot warnings, automatic headlights, etc.

Automation is the biggest opportunity in car safety. The mechanical engineering on cars has entered the terminal stage. Software is all that's left to do, really.

Carmakers are still making considerable advances in mechanical crash safety -- the US added an off-center front impact requiement recently.

Nonetheless, the gains that stand to be realized by automation are clearly far greater than what remains to be gotten mechanically. Much better to avoid a collision altogether than to try to survive it.

> Much better to avoid a collision altogether than to try to survive it.

That's a horrid strategy from a sales perspective. Crash test ratings are one of the main benchmarks used by a large group of new car buyers (women and couples not shopping for the cheapest compact on the lot).

The mechanical engineering on the Toyota Camry might be a solved problem. The Germans have yet to figure out how to make the mechanisms behind their fun driving dynamics reliable too. A car that drives like a $60,000 sportscar, without the high price tag or maintenance burden, would do quite well.

Salary can't and shouldn't be compared accross the globe. Being paid 170k€ in san francisco is maybe the "normal" but few company can afford it in europe or just about anywhere else. And salary is missleading because way of life is way more expensive there.

For me the claim is right, there is not enough engineers and they are all going abroad aka there is a shortage. From my perspective (paris, france) even if you would pay engineers double from now on to match US salary, there will still be a shortage for the next 10years at least.

"Salary can't and shouldn't be compared accross the globe." I disagree. If the hiring company is looking for the best candidates in the world, then they must be prepared to shell out comparable 'global' salaries.

It depends at which level

At a "unique/very few in the world", yes, location only makes your (high) salary goes higher. But then you have 6 digits in your salary regardless if it's in $/€/£

At a "specialized position" (I guess several people on HN are here), you absolutely don't need to offer the same salary regardless of geographical position, but it has to be competitive.

I disagree to your disagreement :p

The talent war is continental rather than global. There are plenty of VISA issues and legal troubles that make it impossible for a lot of people to work in a lot of countries [and for those who do, it's preventing them to get the top end of local salaries].

Thus there is no global salary.

there is no global salary. But if a company in say, New York City, needed a special skill, you can bet they would pay NYC prices to get it regardless of location. For the rest of us saps, your comment rings true (this coming from a guy who makes less due to his location)

A top notch engineer might not want to move from Poland to the US, even if she gets paid 5-7 times as much there. She would give up all her family life and friends, and that's not for everybody. Hence, a Polish company won't have to offer 170k, or even 100k. They only have to get the upper hand of, say, German companies that are reachable via a daily commute, or require only one day per week in the office. I think 60k would do in that case? (Naive guess)

Even within cities employers face competition that they need to respond to if they want to compete. There are plenty of employers in London trying to hire experienced software developers or PhD machine learning experts for less than I made 5 years ago as a junior developer, let alone compared to what banks in London are willing to pay.

There may well be a shortage, but that is all the more reason to increase salaries if you want to compete in the global market for software developers.

This captures it quite well. A "shortage" means that you cannot fill the need regardless of what you are willing to pay. A "pricing problem" means that engineers you can get for your offered pay are incapable of meeting the requirements of the job.

Is real shortage possible? If what I am willing to pay is limitless, won't people catch up, learn the skills and shortage willl be gone?

Yes it's possible.

1) The market ain't perfect. There are employers willing to pay but employees don't know about them. They can't get in touch.

2) If there is a very limited supply of people (I believe that's real for a lot of complex stuff), a single person can only be at a single place, it only take a few employers to get all of them and that's it!

It gets worse... because then people can't catch up and train. Training need time and mentoring, time is slow, mentoring is hard because the mentor are stuck in a few selection organizations with impossibly high standards.

After some time, yes. But there is lag in the system, while people get educated and while culture changes to value engineers as much as doctors or lawyers were values in the past.

I never agreed to use such a definition for "shortage".

> London trying to hire experienced software developers or PhD machine learning experts for less than I made 5 years ago as a junior developer, let alone compared to what banks in London are willing to pay.

numbers?

Part of the reason for the shortage of IT talent is that companies want workers who are:

1. Intelligent

2. Talented

3. Willing to work insane hours

4. Willing to put with the companies insane crap

If companies were willing to settle for 1 & 2, they could draw on a large pool of people. But 3 & 4 have become such the norm that companies wind-up with permanent shortage.

And 3 & 4 are standard as part of the program which reduced the wages of shlep workers and random bureaucrats from 1980 to now everywhere so they aren't very negotiable.

The standard has been to endless rounds of layoff and we loose talent or common sense, we can hire from outside. It seems like this is the result.

If you doubled salaries in Paris, you'd get more people from across Europe moving to Paris. If nothing else, it would put Paris on my list of alternative destinations after Brexit.

High salaries make people move. The cost of moving is just another price.

Thats silly enough that it made me smile. "Should" is a loaded word in any circumstance, but you're really putting a lot into it.

I think right here, your "should" stands in for the assumption that we're on the verge of stopping migration of capital infrastructure and labor!

But how can companies in SFO/NYC make money while paying these salaries?

My pet theory is that because engineers elsewhere are cheaper their time isn't valued as much and they end up being assigned work which is far below their potential. Eg work being done manually instead of being automated.

Nah. You can do the same work as in SF, or more interesting stuff, or less interesting. Whatever.

You're paid less because local companies have less money, there is less competition to drive wages up, and costs of living is cheaper.

SF has lots of EXTREMELY profitable companies, it could pay anything.

Working on high leverage problems in high value markets.

A (software) engineer that would not automate their work, the kind of work routinely automated elsewhere, looks pretty doubtful to me. Making machines work instead of people is basically the engineer's job description.

You are making the assumption that most companies in SF are trying to be profitable. 100k for a junior Rails CRUD developer is a bubble.

> Salary can't and shouldn't be compared accross the globe.

It depends. If you want to attract global talent, comparable salary is very important. An American who works in Europe for two years doesn't gain any of the benefits of the social system.

"Salary can't and shouldn't be compared across the globe"

and

"there is not enough engineers and they are all going abroad"

Your prospective employees seem to disagree with your first statement.

> From my perspective (paris, france) even if you would pay engineers double from now on to match US salary, there will still be a shortage for the next 10years at least.

If they wanted to have anyone, they could start by paying decent wages BEFORE people leave the country. And well, there should be jobs too ^^

Also, double then double again. The costs of living in Paris and the taxes are insane. And abroad pays more than you think it does.

Plenty of people in the City (uk) make 170k) but google doesn't pay that in the same location does it.

Google = £85k base in London.

From the guys I know who interviewed here (and are publicly mocking on the company and advising people to not bother interviewing there :D)

Where in the city do you get 170k GBP for a tech job ?

"Tech" companies treat their engineers as investments

Mr. Business from Business Factory LLC treats their engineers as expenses

this isn't relevant to just salaries, but to the tools available and requested, to the blanket IT policies

> Mr. Business from Business Factory LLC treats their engineers as expenses

Mister Business can go without engineers, then. You'd think he'd let his own biases not get in the way of how a market actually works.

It's not just MBAs that act this way. A lot of engineers believe that their rockstar skillset is the only one that runs a company, and therefore only they should be compensated at some "elite" status.

Of course

But the engineer who put up with Mr. Business crap are not the brightest ones usually. And to be fair they probably won't care to correct when Mr. Business wants to do something stupid (or just don't know this is the case). Or even if they do care Mr. B knows better right? Because he's the boss

Then Mr B goes out of business because his product sucks, or "gets hacked".

I've never seen a company where engineers were the "elite" status.

Yes, and technical engineers are like designing in bits of platinum to the engine, its more expensive but that it what it takes to get the performance out of the product.

They (the MBA types), of all people, should understand that. And I think they do, what they don't like is that given the expense and what they expect they can charge for the service, they can't figure out how to get the profit margin they want/need.

It has been my experience that nothing is more frustrating to an MBA than a really killer market winning idea that happens to be unimplementable because the humans involved need to be paid to build or operate it.

Your last paragraph seems unreal. A business person is not someone who has an MBA but someone who had a proof of running a successful business. Idnt that the same treatment CS graduates get ?

There are CS graduates that are frustrated that their perfectly good algorithm or idea takes "too much" CPU time or memory to run. And in that way they are similar.

It is the notion of the 'unreasonable man' who wants something which reasonable people consider impossible.

People confuse credentials as having the same weight as experience, when reality couldn't be further from the truth.

Which is why I wouldn't trust any of the traditional car makers with their "self-driving cars" over the next decade...or two.

Don't trust the Silicon Valley 'break the rules until you're forced to stop' types either. The traditional car makers are much more likely to be very deliberate and methodical about the tremendous variability in conditions that a self-driving car has to succeed in.

On the other side you have guys like George Hotz who had a reporter in the car with him when he turned on the self-driving system he had only gotten working that morning..

> On the other side you have guys like George Hotz who had a reporter in the car with him when he turned on the self-driving system he had only gotten working that morning..

Do you think that's actually true? I thought it was just something that George Hotz misguidedly said for dramatic effect...

I hope he was being dramatic but judging from how he responded to the NHTSA letter he received and his general disregard for regulations I have to take him at his word.

The offensive yet realistic version:

SV is a bunch of 20 years old who'll overworked themselves to death to deliver a car made only with the latest shiniest tools (because that's all they know) that will crash after 5 minutes (quality, who gives a fuck in web development?).

The traditional car maker will run on old stuff like they're used to, made by older people (experienced ex-SV folks who went back to their home state) who have a family and care about their children on the back seat not ending up in a tree with the car (quality or GTFO!), and they'll be delivered by their extensive network of dealership and partners around the world.

Well. That is unless the traditional car maker is run by old guys who've been there for 20 years because that's the only job in town and they really don't have the experience to deliver anything nowadays.

Looks like the first manufacturer to reconcile both workers generation along with industry experience will win. (That's no small feat).

As someone that is inside a historic car manufacturer right now in IT : The latter. They have had 20 years of having nothing to deliver and reduction in budget. It shows.

Engines and mechanical parts are good, mainly because it makes the car less expensive and help to keep up with pollution and security laws. And partly because if you are in that type of field, apart from a car manufacturer... who are you going to work for ?

But for the tech part... forget it. Really.

Do you have reason to believe that they treat their software engineers poorly? I know people who work on software at Ford and GM, and they seem to enjoy it. Plus, just based on Glassdoor[1][2], the salaries seem pretty good relative to cost of living.

Edit: On another read-through, my comment is a non sequitur. The Big Three are just so intertwined with automakers in my mind that it was hard to shake the association, even knowing that this article is about Japanese car companies.

[1]: Software Engineers at Ford: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Ford-Motor-Company-Software...

[2]: Software Engineers at GM: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/General-Motors-Software-Eng... // Software Developers (not sure about the title difference) at GM: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/General-Motors-Software-Dev...

Not only that, Mr. Business from Business Factory LLC is what gives bad name to consulting with fixed size projects and zero expectations about quality, as long as, it kind of works.

How much you pay should be determined by the market and how much profit each person contributes the company. Instead managers have driven this figure down to the point where salaries don't in any way reflect the value being generated, and does not even match inflation. That's because the market isn't working, instead the managers are deciding and since they are all in implicit collusion with each other the market does not have the chance to actually work. The recent debacle of agreeing not to poach between the big 5 companies was explicit proof of this sort of thing occurring explicitly instead of implicitly. But it's managers who determine the pay structure not the market.

And they keep on keeping it low by complaining about lack of workers. Getting H1Bs in to the country. Forcing pro immigration policies when the local population does not have job. It's all a conceited effort to diminish salaries.

And they really are not affected by how it impacts their company. Company has billions sitting in the bank. As long as H/R does its job, i.e. keeping the salaries low, none of these sorts of people get fired. So they keep on. The work doesn't get done, but the CEO doesn't care. Enough profit is being generated, enough costs are being cut. Who cares if the economy has to pay for this sort of thing. It's not the people who are actually making the decisions.

Small businesses depend on money from big companies paid out to employees to thrive. If they don't have it small business does not get done. But it's not as if that affects the managers making the decisions, so they keep on.

Without all of those managers and admin and sales doing what they do the engineers wouldn't be able to generate as much value. How do you decide who is responsible for the value and how everyone should be paid? If you can do it better than it is done traditionally, start your own company and eat their lunch.

> If you can do it better than it is done traditionally, start your own company and eat their lunch.

You can't make a company do anything objectively better through these insights, though in specific cases things would get done sooner, and even if you could which company is going to listen to someone saying that they should pay their employees more. In fact lots of management "wisdom" goes exactly against that, they see their engineers as idiots manipulated by pop psychology. Not people who deserve to get wealthy.

It's just that operationally they adversely affect the economy, not necessarily the company. As I said usually the companies exercising this sort of behavior are already doing well. They have plenty of profit and plenty of money in the bank. It's those size of companies that have the sort of managerial class that practices this sort of behavior. And the managerial class justifies it, and the CEO believes it, so it continues.

Who pays is the economy at large, and engineers who are not becoming wealthy who continue to be wage slaves. But lots of CEOs and managers believe that this is exactly how things should be.

You can't change this by starting your own company. Because then you are a CEO or a manager. And if one company pays their employees well and does well, well that changes very little. Companies are simply systems, there are many ways to run them and still be profitable.

I work at a tech heavy SaaS company, but in reality, we're really a sales company. I have recognized this, and have excelled because of it.

Isn't every company a sales company, in reality?

My argument was not even about sales. So I don't know how it got thrown in there. Sales are important, marketing people are important, managers are important. That's not the issue that concerns me. It's this sort of behavior where you supposedly have a labor market, but it's not really a market, that concerns me. The markets regulate themselves with the value of labor going up with the value that it generates in the market through competition for finite resources. But here we have some sort of pseudo slavery, where a worker is only justified enough money to maintain their living while companies are deriving multiples of value from their work without competing for their services.

It's as if I were selling a product, and the middle man as a class were forcing a price through collusion so they could make a massive profit on it. That in law is called unjust enrichment and it's illegal.

Ah, I was replying to the parent comment, but your point is interesting.

> where you supposedly have a labor market

Anyone who thinks we have an econ 101 labor market (where what is being sold is fungible and easily tradeable) hasn't searched for a job recently. Unlike capital, where a dollar is typically a dollar no matter where it comes from (though the idea of "smart money" implies that this statement is false), labor has many gradations and suppliers that vary.

Because of that, and because of the fact that employers have more leverage (because they typically are a monopsony of a particular laborer's offering), prices of labor are not equal to the marginal productivity of that laborer, but instead, as you argue, far lower.

The solution is pretty simple: the laborer should stop being an employee, start their own firm, bear more of the risk that an employer does (ever chase down an invoice? No fun!), and get compensated as such.

Other than that, you could organize and have the group (formerly called a union) compete with management for a greater share of profits, but the variation in laborer productivity would still exist and the more productive laborer would still be under compensated.

If bread costs 100 dollars per loaf, would that fit the definition of a "bread shortage"?

If 90% of the US population is unable to afford to buy food and is going to starve soon, is there a food shortage?

I would think so.

The literal definition of a shortage is that price is too high.

Everything ALWAYS has a price.

I agree with this point of view and it makes a lot of sense to me. If the price is high for something, that is indicative of a shortage. I fail to see how this can be in any ways controversial.

On the other hand, I can't not notice that most readers on HN are very well paid SW engineers that profit from this shortage, quite handsomely sometimes. So it's understanding that posts like this will not be received on HN, it's the public's bias showing.

On the other hand, I'm an Eastern European dev that is, while well paid for my location, still 1/5 as I would be in other locations so I'm incentivized to come and compete with other high paid professionals, so maybe this post is MY bias showing.

> On the other hand, I can't not notice that most readers on HN are very well paid SW engineers that profit from this shortage, quite handsomely sometimes.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

It's the typical case of when you ask the guy next to you that does the same job and he's paid a lot less. Or when you ask you friend that are doctors/lawyers/finance guys and they all earned more than you.

There is probably some folks on HN who's on the very top end [in their respective locations] but that's not representative of the usual dev.

> If bread costs 100 dollars per loaf, would that fit the definition of a "bread shortage"?

Of course not. There can be plenty of bread, just a shortage of money. The government prints more money and then everyone can buy bread again.

The literal definition of shortage is lack of the resource. Having US workers train their H1B replacements is not a shortage.

In the bread scenario, the high price was driven by the shortage. That is, there isn't enough wheat physically available to fulfill the demand. Typical wheat production ends up with a surplus, which is stored, destroyed, or sold to lower-tier markets at a large discount.

I see the point you're trying to make. But the point remains that the high price of a commodity is a reflection of scarcity, not the other way around.

I didn't downvote you, but I'm assuming most commenters on HN don't want to be compared to bread or other commodities.

I don't see where you disagree with the OP. You say the same thing.

> But the point remains that the high price of a commodity is a reflection of scarcity, not the other way around.

I really fail to see the difference between OP and your point. Can you please elaborate?

People aren't a commodity. Bread can't collectively bargain, improve it's own flavor to increase it's value, or start it's own granary. Comparing commodities to software engineers or what have you is be it's very nature an oversimplification and isn't very useful.

>The literal definition of a shortage is that price is too high.

The question is too high for what? A bread price that is "too high" means people starve or struggle to feed themselves.

When tech companies complain of tech salaries being "too high" they are simultaneously reaping massive profits, so they're not exactly struggling to survive.

+1 because The companies dont want to pay that much.

Very few people are exposing the truth, and even fewer go into details. Why dont companies want to pay yhe fair price ? Who are the gatekeepers or middlemen/middlewoman (- to be politically correct) ? How many jobs on the internet are duplicates ? How great developers are rejected and succeed on their on a few years later ?

"I get really tired of companies saying "Talent Shortage" when they really mean "I don't want to pay that much.""

I wanted to agree with you but then, by your definition, there would never be any shortages. Because with a high enough offer one would always be able to purchase anything, in spite of "shortages".

There is no talent shortage but there is a willing to pay decent wages shortage. This entire article stinks of exactly that.

If there were no talent shortage, companies wouldn't have to offer high wages to hire people. You're looking at two sides of the same coin.

Problem is they want senior developers but only want to pay junior developer wages. There is a flood of junior developers out there that can't get jobs. These companies don't want them though. They want senior developers who don't have to work for those lower wages because they can easily make $170k on their own or elsewhere. If they really do want those senior developers then they need to pay up. Otherwise, hire junior developers and put in place a program to get them up to speed.

Not true, you can't base Japanese salaries on US salaries. Countries have different currencies with different buying power. Salaries are based on the local market.

Even in US, we see such broad differences between CA, NY and say OH and TN.

Sure salaries are based on local market, but the issue is companies are pondering why the local market is having a "shortage" to begin with. You can argue people must accept local market salaries if they want to live in a certain city or lifestyle.

But why not live somewhere where you are compensated 3x as much, and travel to said city, and still have money left over? It's not as if Tokyo's cost of living is 1/3rd of San Francisco.

Personally, I live in San Francisco. This wouldn't be my first pick if I was "retired" / didn't work. But, being a salaryman in SV, even with the higher cost of living, provides me a higher standard of living, insofar that I can travel to other places in the world, eat / live well, and still have money leftover. The reverse wouldn't be possible if I lived in Japan with this purported 1/3rd compensation. For me, traveling as a tourist is sufficient, I don't need years long "immersion".

BTW

If you consider white rice and noodles a meal then both will cost you $7 USD in Tokyo. However if you want to compare a meal with vegetables and meat then that will run you around $15 USD per meal.

You can get premade meals at 7-11 in Tokyo for much less than 7 USD.

They are 50% rice, 20% sauce, 30% other

A Yoshinoya beef bowl can be had for 6 USD and is a lot more than rice and some noodles. If I didn't have to eat it all at once, I wouldn't eat anything else that day.

well I would be happy to get ~60kUSD-80kUSD a year. For me that would be a dream since I have no bachelor and no master. Guess I probably wouldn't be the biggest talent to hire and I actually would need to change my main programming language for japanse carmakers (I actually do Scala mainly and I guess they probably need more like c/c++/rust guys...) also for 170k USD I would even move out of my country and learn a new language (not programming language)...

Well. The salaries are for experienced people, preferably with a bachelor/master.

I doubt that there aren't many bachelor/master out there, directly after graduating (where they already get 60k) who know the same as I do. With more than 5 years of experience and working with open source projects, I think I'm already pretty experienced. I just didn't take the time to study it, which I eventually will do (at some point in the future, if I have the courage to attend a evening school)

Everyone think they're pretty experienced. People can't evaluate themselves, they don't know what they don't know ;)

Well I already interviewed some people and I tought wow, they didn't programmed a lot during their studies. And I actually tried to study, but it was more like 10-20% science and the rest around business, that's why I canacled it after a year. Well I know a lot of smart people already and their were pretty smart directly after their graduation, but somehow I already seen a lot of people who just graduated and have no idea what they are doing.

I actually think that's the people I compared myself with and I know that this is maybe not the best idea. (I already had some people that wanted to hire me, but they wouldn't have paid me 60k (the highest was like 45k-50k or so and some didn't even written what they offer but probably not more than 45k.) or more and it would've involved moving and that's what I didn't wanted, at that time)

I think that comparing yourself to the worst of the crop is not a good idea ;)

I don't know what city you're talking about. The articles was mixing salaries in some Japan cities and some American cities which is a very bad indicator.

Bloomberg's article title is really confusing here. It should say "Japanese Carmakers are Learning Tech Talent Doesn't Come Cheap".

It's not at all surprising and is part of Japan's overall difficulty in attracting foreign IT talent or cultivating it locally. Professional work culture and benefits packages will have to change if they're going to catch up in the IT sector in the future.

I think the automotive industry is going to develop a lot the way the smartphone industry has in that software is going to become a much bigger component of the value proposition of the product. You can build an excellent car but if you don't have good connectivity, smart features, driver assist technologies, and slick user interfaces you're going to get blown off the road by the companies that get it right.

That's not a japanese phenomen. In the german automotive industry it's the same thing - and it's one of the reasons I left one of the big german OEMs.

Salaries are very fixed at those companies. You will start at around 50k€ after university, advance to 70-80€ during the next years and will be basically stuck there. The corporations have defined fixed salary levels together with the unions and these don't contain any "super-complex", "in-demand" or "rockstar" levels. It doesn't even matter whether you are doing mechanical engineering, software, or powerpoint engineering. There exist higher salaries, but only for team leads and above - which mostly don't perform technical work anymore.

I love the phrase "powerpoint engineering" and I think I'm going to use it in my daily speech patterns now.

Sounds like the US defense industry.

I thought people were doing defence work as contractors now, which is decently paid, as all contracting work.

Anyway, defence should be reasonable hours without week end works and on call. Not comparable to the average bro-grammer company.

> I thought people were doing defence work as contractors now, which is decently paid, as all contracting work.

"Contractor" does not mean the individuals doing the work are 1099 contractors. It means the work is done through government contracts to private companies. There is serious cost pressure on those contracts and the people actually doing the work are generally making below market compensation.

> Anyway, defence should be reasonable hours without week end works and on call. Not comparable to the average bro-grammer company.

If only. Sure, you can skate by doing that if you don't mind wallowing in a boring role with 3% (if you are lucky) annual raises. If you want any sort of decent career progression you'll be doing 50+ a week and doing whatever needs to be done to hit the often unrealistic delivery targets.

I think that contracting is also similar in automotive, as the OEMs mostly work on the requirements and integration parts and most of the component development is done by external contractors.

However contractors there will rarely mean individuals. It's mostly medium to very large companies (Tier-1 suppliers) themselves. As these are usually under cost pressure it's often not that well paid.

About half the IT professionals in Japan have never changed jobs, compared with 14 percent in the U.S. and 21 percent in China, according to the METI survey.

“We cannot afford to have people that only come here for a year or two,” said Redzic

Translation:

About half the IT professionals in Japan have never learned anything new outside of their office, compared with 14 percent in the U.S. and 21 percent in China, according to the METI survey.

“We cannot afford to have people that have wide ranges of experience,” said Redzic

No wonder they (allegedly) have difficulties adopting best practices such as version control.

From personal experience (other workplaces may have different policies), I can see why people in Japan would not change jobs very often. A large proportion of your salary can be in the form of performance bonuses, which you technically aren't eligible for when you first start. This means that you can take a huge pay cut for the first 12 months because you might only receive a token bonus.

>The development cycle for a car usually last years, which can be frustrating for programmers used to building a system in weeks, said Mandali Khalesi, Asia-Pacific chief of Netherlands-based digital map-maker HERE, owned by German automakers Audi AG, BMW AG and Daimler AG. “These people are from complete IT backgrounds and they don’t expect these long-time cycles,” he said in an interview in Tokyo.

Do these hackers no longer exist in the US? Or is everyone a hipster rubyist today?

> Do these hackers no longer exist in the US? Or is everyone a hipster rubyist today?

Oh, they exist. It's just the proportion of programmers these days skew heavily toward web devs and "hipster rubyists" than it used to. There are still a lot of low-level guys and people with experience with these waterfall models. However, as "self driving cars" become the rage with a lot of the public, more hipster rubyist types will want to jump ship to this rage from their last and will apply expecting the same culture to prevail.

I'm afraid the "hipster rubyists" have little to contribute towards the self driving cars field. You need an actual degree, if not a masters or doctorate to play. That's why there's a shortage. I don't think these auto-makers are talking about the type of skills you can pick up in a few weekends of watching Code School videos or trying to teach yourself machine learning without a formal education in mathematics/statistics. This is not easy stuff.

> You need an actual degree, if not a masters or doctorate to play. That's why there's a shortage.

That's part of why there is a shortage. The other part is that the companies in the industry either have standards that are too high (must have years of recent experience in their particular laundry list) or don't know what they are actually looking for.

I have the degree, I have years of real-time sensor experience, but nobody will talk to me because I have been doing NLP for the past four years.

Give me a stack of textbooks, a list of open problems to study, and a six month supply of caffeine.

Sure. Do you want a divorce with that?

That's the spirit!

Overall, degrees don't mean anything to this sort of education anymore, especially in computing. Everybody in industry bemoans that people are graduating without skills, knowledge, or formal thought processes.

Universities have dropped the ball in the last few decades as they've been turned to profit centers, taking advantage of an increasingly externally funded captive audience who requires degrees. But while employers have some realization of this situation, they're still stuck on degrees being meaningful.

I agree these skills aren't easy stuff, and the best place to pick it up is university. But going through university doesn't mean someone actually gained these skills. And being without a degree doesn't mean someone is without the skills. It's become orthogonal.

I wanted to also comment to the guy that mentioned the music degree'd CS below with the same thing:

In the article they specifically bemoan the fact that people no longer want to work on projects for "years". A degree (even more so a masters or PhD) basically says to an employer "this person has the type of personality that can work at something for years" which is exactly what they want. Even better if he's already skilled in the field you need skills for.

> You need an actual degree, if not a masters or doctorate to play.

The most highly cited CS researcher that I've worked with has an undergraduate degree in music and no graduate level formal training... smarts, focus, and a keen eye can get one pretty far.

Part of the focus on degree is similar to a business adage: "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM." In a similar way, if something goes wrong or doesn't pan out over the longer cycles, "Nobody gets fired for hiring a PHD."

I think the whole thing with webdev is that the barrier to entry for starting your own little company or SaaS or even being a contractor is much lower. Not many bootstrapped embedded programming startups - if you're doing low level stuff you seem to always be working for medium to large companies.

So I don't do work with low-level stuff (computational physicist here, so different low-level), but I was of the impression things like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi and all these open source maker tools have significantly lowered the barrier too, if not at least the overhead.

It's definitely easier to get into embedded programming. But blinking a light, or monitoring the air pressure around you isn't going to pay the bills as easily. Compare that to making a simple web application or extension, and signing up for adwords. Almost all programming is easier now than when I was growing up (regardless of area), but that doesn't mean that those areas have all had the same level of growth in terms of actual proficient programmers.

ex: Compare the ease of creating the site at the top of the google search for "subnet calculator", and how much it makes in ad driven traffic vs what you would have to do to monetize even the simplest embedded project.

Are people making enough money to quit their day jobs doing stuff for the Arduino and Raspberry? My impression was that it's all hobbyist.

If there are, please someone let me know.

There is a market for stuff like that that integrate into tools, especially for factories. But it needs more integration and investment, and it needs to be able to sale to big entreprisey world, where you compete with IBM, Cisco and co.

But there is definitely something to do to instrument factories and lines.

That's not true at all. I've only worked for small companies. Nowadays, almost any kind of electronics design or manufacturing involves digitally controlled components and thus microcontrollers, so even old school rf companies, for example, have to bring on someone to do the embedded stuff. And of course there are also many small companies derived from the maker movement.

Take anything people with titles like "Asia-Pacific chief" say with a lot of grains of salt. They are used to making sweeping generalizations that only reflect their own view of something and often has little to do with reality or statistics.

You can easily find people who will work in dev cycles of years if you give them a $250k+, a good private office, and perks that are usually seen in so-called "Hipster Rubyist" shops like flexible timings. The problem is that companies with a dev cycle of years tend to also expect their programmers to swipe in a time card every day, sit at a shitty desk with a shitty chair, and drink Folgers coffee. Then their "chief" whines saying "We can't find any programmers!".

It's not the case that no one is like that (and honestly, most of your so-called "hipster rubyists" aren't like that either). This is just an excuse put up by companies that want people to eat a 55% pay cut to work there. Like most critiques of "the next generation", it's bullshit.

Many have been kicked out of the industry and off-shored or attrited away.

Banks, Fortune 100 and government had lots of these folks 15 years ago.

Those hipster rubyist make more money so maybe some of those hackers went that route. Can't blame them.

Our Tokyo office is really difficult to staff. Remembering the whole job for life culture - you just can't hire experienced people you have to hire graduates and then train them up. So if you want someone with 10 years experience you have to have hired someone 10 years ago. Of course you can't fire them if you decide you didn't need so many.

So we hire many foreigners which aren't easy to come by either, and do most dev work elsewhere.

What's the process for hiring foreigners?

I'd love to live and work in Japan but basically every job ad I've seen online wants people who speak Japanese and are already in Japan. Bit of a catch 22...

I think its probably the same for any large corporation. I'd check with banks, insurance companies, even Japanese manufacturers where you can start with a job in the US with the view to move.

What about people who don't live in the US?

Not aware of many European multinationals with a big footprint in Japan who are keen to ship over staff.

Google Japan hires from all over the world and will sponsor visas if you get an offer. Obviously the office is focused on the Japanese market, so roles that don't require fluent Japanese are quite limited, but there's a sizable software engineering team that explicitly does not require it:

https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/software-e...

But as in any company, the best way to get posted overseas is to get in locally first and then apply for positions internally.

I think there are lots of Americans in the tech industry who are interested in living in Japan for a while, they're just not interested in taking a 50-70% pay cut to do it.

Yeah the problem is if you're going to relocate someone to Japan you might as well get someone from India/Poland/Russia/Brazil rather than the most expensive country. Still we did have a graduate from San Diego move there for a few years.

Do you have a contact detail? I am not looking at the moment but I may want to move to Japan in the future since my wife is Japanese.

I'm not a very experienced engineer, but I did go to a world class school and have worked for a few years. I have been job hunting in Japan and recently received an offer from a large web company in Japan. They were offering less than 30k usd, and would not negotiate at all. I have no incentive to do a full time job when I can make the same with half the hours.

You could make the same in two weeks.

I have to say, with the best will in the world, I don't believe you.

I don't believe that someone is paying $15000 a week for some basic software development.

Factor in the full week, including week end at extra fees, the perks costs, the insurance, the office, the pension. A 5 figure sum seems perfectly reasonable!

However, it's not take-home pay and it's not for basic development.

If you charge $150/hr and work a 2 week blitz for 100 hours/week.

It's possible.

After perusing his Twitter I'd say he has escaped basic software development.

$1500 per hour? It's looks impossible for a developer, unless he is doing a business.

Where to work is a very multidimensional question, but all of the talk (HR, execs, managers, and even potential employees) proxies it into dollars and cents.

I know people who went to Google and came screaming back feeling that they had Stepford-wifed their youth away. I know other smart people working for libraries and universities for a fraction of what they could make just for the tranquility of it.

If you're young and have no responsibilities, don't get too hung-up on the money. Just go out there and try some shit. You never know what's going to be a good fit, although it's usually pretty easy to spot what's going to be a bad one.

> don't get too hung-up on the money

Correct. Not on money, but also not on name ("I have to work for one of the big 4")

Great point! I'm tempted to go back and add "not getting too hung-up on the vanity of companies and titles" and giving you credit for it, but that would probably be asking too much. :-)

Looks like the title is wrong or something got lost in translation.

It should, in fact, be "Japan's Carmakers Are Learning Tech Talent Doesn't Come Cheap"

This should be filed for safekeeping... you know, for the next time a journalist laments how grossly overpaid programmers are.

I do hope some Japanese auto companies get self-driven going. Having been peripherally involved with a couple of Japanese software projects,I would appreciate their rigorous approach as a customer.

Unfortunately I found the same trait stressful and overly nit-picky as a foreign engineer - I'll freely admit it was the best QA I've witnessed in my life by report quality, thoroughness and turnaround times. I got the impression that they do not move fast and break things. I don't know how well SV folk will adapt in such environments.

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