Hi everyone, I’m a 24M software engineer from Canada with 2 years of dev experience, 1 year of QA, and N1, and am aiming to go to Japan and job hunt early next year. I heard that it is much more easier to find a job if you are located in Japan and also that Canadians on a WHV don’t need to leave the country to change to a work visa, so that’s why I plan to job hunt from Japan. I understand it would be infinitely better to attain more experience in Canada first. However, there are factors driving me to go quickly, namely that my parents are already quite old, and so I want to go while they are healthy and there’s nothing tying me down to Canada. Also, I want to finally link up with my SO of 2 years.
Here’s an outline of my current plan:
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Set aside 15k CAD to job hunt in Tokyo for at least 6 months, go back if the situation seems dire or stay longer while working part time
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Apply for IT jobs, ideally aiming for at least 5M JPY / year but willing to go down to 4M if remote and I can live in a LOC area. In the worst case scenario, maybe work for a dispatch company
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Sign up for recruiting companies (any recommendations are welcome!) and apply for jobs on LinkedIn, TokyoDev, and JapanDev, and other sources
Given all of this, I have a few questions about how viable my plan is:
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By the time I’ll move I’ll have had 2.5 years of dev experience, but currently 1 year of that is from internship experience. In Japan, will this not help? Should I be expected to be treated just like a new grad with 1.5 YOE? For what it’s worth, that internship experience is with the same company I work at full-time right now, so I hope it can be seen in some sort of continuity. The QA experience is also all internship experience.
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Given the above, does it still seem to be incredibly risky to find a job in this market? I understand the world as a whole is going through a rough time for developers but I was hoping to leverage my language ability and hopefully my experience in a popular framework (Next.js). So would 6 months be too little leeway?
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Are my expectations for salary with my background unreasonable?
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Is it really beneficial to job hunt from Tokyo? Not sure how often interviews are still being done in-person for software jobs in Japan. If not, I could save by being farther out, and relocating afterwards
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Is 100k JPY after rent enough to survive decently in Tokyo these days? I’m not planning to spend much on leisure or travel, but I’m also not the best cook and expect myself to eat out every now and then. I’d prefer not to have to be tracking everything I spend on.
These are all the main things I’d like to know to ensure the viability of my plan. I hope that I can at least feel that I have a decent chance of making it in Japan. Thanks in advance for any insights!
P.S: Thanks to everyone on this sub who’s provided useful feedback to posts! This sub was an incredible resource for me and I’m sure many others’ plans
by Simplejin