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Comment by j7ake | Hacker News Reader

It’s harder to fire people in Japan and Europe compared to USA.

The downside is that it is extremely hard for new grads with no experience to get their first job in Japan and Europe compares to USA.

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In Japan, new graduates, known as "shinsotsu," have a unique opportunity to secure jobs without relevant experience beyond their schoolwork. In contrast, mid-career hires, called "cyuto-saiyo," are selected based on their skills. However, within companies, rank is determined by tenure, so unless hired specifically as a manager, even experienced hires start at the bottom, regardless of their age and experience. This age-based hierarchy is reminiscent of the traditional lifetime employment system, which persists in some conservative companies.

This system makes it relatively difficult to find jobs elsewhere, creating a negative feedback loop where employees might feel compelled to stay despite poor treatment. This is why many tolerate long working hours and unfavorable conditions. Additionally, some companies make it difficult for employees to resign, leading to the rise of resignation proxies who represent individuals in the resignation process.

Wages are also much lower in Japan than the USA. Average Japanese software developer salary is 32,164.34 USD [1]. Even accounting for purchasing power parity, it's still only ~40-50K. That's peanuts. I made $110K straight out of college, with another $100k through equity. I did get lucky through equity (at the strike price, my RSUs would only have been ~50k per year) but even excluding equity that's over twice the average Japanese developer salary for a new grad.

https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/software-developer-salarie...

> The downside is that it is extremely hard for new grads with no experience to get their first job in … and Europe compares to USA.

Not sure about Japan or rest of EU, but in Germany, landing a SWE with no prior experience beyond basics(watched some videos on YouTube and wrote some HTML/CSS in notepad) in larger corps is easy. Firing is also simple(2 weeks notice) during first 6 months probation period.

The counter to that counter is that I have been told that software jobs in Germany start out as very low paying. My friend who moved to Germany to work as a programmer ended up only getting about $30k a year to start, which at the time was less than half of what our peers were making in the US.

That said, I think probationary periods are one of the best ideas the US needs to adopt.

>>probationary periods are one of the best ideas the US needs to adopt

May I ask why? Both Canada and USA allow employers to fire with 2 weeks (or a month .. I forget )notice.

In the US you can be fired with 0 notice or severance, regardless of tenure in most states.

Even though you are entitled to fire people in the US, there are a lot of differing state and city rules. You are also open to (potential) lawsuits at all times. There are also now a lot of very obtuse rules about things like healthcare coverage for full time employees.

There's an extra layer of simplicity when it comes to probationary periods.

A junior/graduate dev in Germany makes €50K a year. $28K is the minimum wage for a full time employee.

>Not sure about Japan or rest of EU, but in Germany, landing a SWE with no prior experience beyond basics(watched some videos on YouTube and wrote some HTML/CSS in notepad) in larger corps is easy.

I don't think this is true at all, but even if SWE pays pretty badly in Germany, at least compared to the US.

SWE pays bad everywhere compared to the US.

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