I am 28 years old, and as of last June, I have been working in software development for a small-ish Japanese company in Kanagawa. The salary is decent (6M yen before taxes) and there is only overtime in the weeks right before a big release, so I don’t really have much to complain on that regard.
However, a lot of small things that bother me (both inside and outside of the job) are piling up and making my experience here extremely detrimental to my mental health, and I am kind of lost as to what to do.
1) The company’s whole engineering process is absolutely awful and inefficient for the projects I take part in. We essentially use a tool made for data processing, analysis and ETL (Pipeline Pilot) to develop websites, when the tool was ABSOLUTELY not made for this purpose. This makes not only the development process itself a complete nightmare full of unnatural, hacky code but also produces things like a page taking 17 seconds to load in some cases. It also makes me not get any development skills with more current stacks (say, such as React for front-end and Flask/FastAPI for backend) or even older stacks still in the market because no one else does things this way. And neither me nor the other people can do anything about it because it is a REQUIREMENT from the client that we do things this way despite how inefficient it all is.
2) More than half of the job is documenting stuff in Excel, and it bores me out of my mind. To make things worse, if things deviate 1% from what the senior imagined, it is not good enough and must be redone, even if it expresses things better than the current way things are done. This also leads to issues like me taking a whole day to make a single diagram that would take two hours, because requirements were not clarified properly as to what should be in it and the senior failed to inform me that she actually made her own similar graph that I could have used as a base for mine.
3) I got a Master’s in Machine Learning in France before starting to work here, and the job obviously involves none of it. This would be less of a problem if it felt like I was getting other worthwhile skills at it that I could use to get a better job, but I am not since the way we are doing software development is worthless outside of here.
4) Lastly, although I said I don’t have much to complain about the salary, I actually used to get slightly more in my home country (Brazil) after cost of living. This made my journey in getting a Master’s then a new job in the last three years feel pointless, because I’m neither working with my specialty (machine learning), nor had a salary raise in concrete terms. It feels like I could have used all that time, stress and effort to further other goals of mine that I neglected to focus on my studies and professional development, only for none of it to bear fruit.
This all compounds with other things (like being generally lonely and friendless in Japan) to further make me feel depressed. Unfortunately, I cannot return to my old job, and finding a similar one in my home country or even my Master’s country is also not easy at the current moment. So I have essentially been paralyzed and unable to make a decision as to what to set as a goal for my life for the last few months.
So my last resort is really asking for advice from people who have been in situations that mirror mine in some way, or that at least work in this field in Japan. What do you think I should do in this situation?
by Prestigious-Place941