Link to section🇯🇵 Japanese Prefecture
80% of respondents lived in the Greater Tokyo Area (Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa).
Respondents in Tokyo, Chiba, and Kanagawa had the highest median rating of social life satisifaction, while those in Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo had lowest median satisfaction.
Link to section✈️ Relocation Circumstances
Only 5% of respondents were born in Japan. 57% came to Japan via an employer, either after being hired by a Japanese company or transferred by an existing one.
Despite the working holiday visa program being limited to residents of certain countries under a certain age, 7% of respondents came on it.
Link to section🛂 Residency Status
59% of respondents had a residency status tied to their employer (engineer or highly skilled foreign professional).
Link to section🌏 Country or Region
The respondents were quite diverse, holding citizenships from 73 countries or regions.
Link to section🧑💼 Age
81% of respondents were between 20 and 39 years old. The median age was 33.
Link to section⚧ Gender
Male respondents had more experience than female respondents. While men had a median of 7 years of professional experience, women had 6 years. Furthermore, men had a 75th percentile of 13 years of experience compared to 9 for women, indicating that significantly fewer women reach the most senior levels of experience.
This partially explains why the median compensation of male respondents was 46% higher than women respondents. However, even when accounting for professional experience, male respondents continued to make more, and the disparity in pay grew with experience. While men with 4-6 years of experience made 7% more than women, men with 7-9 years of experience made 31% more.
The reasons behind this disparity are complex, but it's clear that women face challenges in the Japanese tech industry. For ideas on concrete action your company can take on this, please see this article.
Link to section🧑💼 Professional Experience
The median respondent had 7 years of professional software development experience, up from 6 years in 2023’s survey.
Respondents who had 1-3 years of experience made a median of ¥3.5 million, down from ¥5.7 million in 2023. The reason behind this drop is unclear.
Link to section🧑💼 Total Employers
Respondents typically changed jobs every two to three years. Those who had had a single employer had a median of 2 years of professional experience, those with two employers had a median of 5 years, and those with three employers had a median of 7 years.
Link to section🇯🇵 Years in Japan
Respondents lived in Japan for a median of 5 years.
While respondents from India and Russia made up 11% of respondents overall, they made up 25% of those who had lived in Japan for less than a year.
Link to section🧑💼 Professional Qualifications
Although coding bootcamp grads made the least overall, when taking into account professional experience, they had higher compensation than those with a bachelor's degree.
Link to section💬 English Ability
94% of respondents were comfortable using English in a professional setting. A higher English ability correlated with higher compensation.
Link to section💬 Japanese Ability
Only 40% of respondents were comfortable using Japanese in a professional setting.
Japanese ability had little correlation with compensation.
Those with conversational Japanese had a median of 5 years living in Japan while those with fluent-level Japanese had a median of 9 years.