IF you try to understand it from the regulators perspective, it totally makes sense. You see, the law is written for legibility, not for variation, and rightly so. $15k cash in the bank is easier to understand than $300k in ETFs. Your $300k ETF might be stable or it might fall below the value of $15k over 6 months (not likely but government officials are not in the business of investigating the stability of individual ETFs). An old HN comment about makes this point about “legibility” well:
“To the state, one of the most important goals is legibility. The state has an enormous burden of regulation in its various enterprises, and the less variance the easier the job. This certainly isn’t ideal in many, many cases, but in this case a person who likely didn’t make the standards quite rationally trusts a vetted standard over one small trivial test given to them by a company they’re evaluating. FIPs standards are probably much more exhaustive than just a hashing performance test on one piece of hardware.”
In Germany there is a similar thing where you need to deposit at least 25,000 € as collateral to be able to create a GmbH (similar to an LLC). This is meant to pay for debts in case the GmbH goes bankrupt.
But the government recognized that this was a problem so the "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" was made possible where you are only required to deposit 1 € initially and than can deposit more each year until you can convert to a GmbH. The UG obviously has to pay more interest on loans if it gets any at all but you are not required to be wealthy to be able to protect yourself from bankruptcy.
As an additional cross-cultural observation, 20-something western young men routinely insist on debating the merits of this policy with the impotent clerk processing their business. I've never seen the clerk unilaterally alter government policy, but the mutual exchange of Confused Face continues just the same.
They have a similar rule for "Specified visa: Designated activities (Long Stay for sightseeing and recreation)".
"Documents such as a bankbook to prove that the applicant’s savings is more than 30 million Japanese yen along with the records indicating the current balance as well as deposits and withdrawals for the past 6 months."
30 million yen is currently 225k USD, but rates can change rapidly so you need significantly more just to be safe as the visa application process is long.
In my experience, the "such as a bankbook" is strictly interpreted as a bank account, a stock portfolio isn't acceptable.
Now the Visa is a 1 year visa, but it issued for six months and then renewed for six months. When renewing you must meet all the original requirements. So, you can withdraw the money after getting the visa, but you need to have it back in the account when renewing! The records for six months appear to indicate that you need the money in the account for six months, but I'm not certain if this is the case.
It makes sense - like Apple's $99 / year developer fee - to keep people abusing the system out. If anyone can create a company for free or for a low admin fee, they will.
...who am I kidding, this happens everywhere all the time and 15K is a low amount to put in a bank account if it means someone can dodge taxes and responsibilities, lmao.
That's weird. I've heard of requirements that business need to have a certain amount in cash reserves, just to guarantee that they can pay severance packages and other guarantees, to stop the owners from declaring bankruptcy too late. But asking for that and then letting them remove it from the account is just weird.
I had to do this in order to get an apartment in the US, when I first moved here. Needed either proof of income or a large static amount of money in the bank. Static at time of snapshot, they didn't really care if it went away afterwards.
That sounds like the kind of requirement that patio11 would know more of the rationale for, if rationale exists, and the workaround, if a workaround exists.
Had this same issue in Malaysia. Was planning to relocate my business there but they wanted us to deposit $250k USD in a bank account for the first year of business. At least buy me dinner first.
> So we share your jobs on our site. A candidate applies. You interview them and decide to hire them. You notify us you hired them. We send you an invoice. You pay us a fee.
I'm absolutely stunned that this works.
> For one thing, our contract imposes a late fee for failing to notify us of a successful hire. And the fee increases every month that they don't tell us. This is a pretty good deterrent.
Is it? It sounds like a pretty good deterrent to being honest...!
I was one of the "Quick aside since I get asked this all the time."[1]
Being from Spain I'm 100% a lot of the companies here would try to cheat this, but he made some good points both in the tweet answers and article; it's better to pay early and low, than being caught very late and having to pay a huge amount (don't know how much better though).
If a company retires a job without paying, I'd def spend few minutes tracking possible candidates (those who clicked "Apply" and put their data, Linkedin/Twitter/etc, follow up emails to the candidates, as he said Amazon gift card, etc).
Some might still fall through the cracks, but seems like if they get enough % of them that's probably good enough.
Japan is a high-trust society. I recently made a booking at a rather expensive inn (ryokan), whose T&C says there are high cancellation fees if you don't show up, but was not required to hand over credit card details or anything else than could enforce this.
Would you rather - save the expense of the agency fee (3 months salary) but lose access to the job board which has already found you one good candidate, or pay it and stay on the job board?
Keeping in mind that the employees are likely staying much longer than 2-3 years, because Japan.
Companies pay recruiters an insane fee to hire us. $300 is a paltry sum and not worth fighting over. I doubt this is a big problem. It's not zero companies doing this, but I'd be surprised if it was 80% of the listings trying to avoid paying.
I heard a similar story from a guy who put in relation brands with professionals of the event industry. According to him, not having to put in place and enforce a strict control gave him a lot of bandwidth to work on more impactful parts of his projects. Surprisingly, he made good bucks with this approach... I guess even businesses can be more honest than expected.
The other day, a career site offered me some amount of money if I told them when I found a job with a company there. (It might've been angel.co, and $150, not certain.)
I guessed that they got paid at least partly as a function of hires, and this incentived disclosure from hirees was a way of keeping its customer companies honest.
Not sure how prevalent LinkedIn or a similar service is in Japan, but I'd imagine it'd be pretty easy to track how many clicks a customer was getting and investigating any that had anomalously high click / hire ratios.
It's kinda funny how strategy and tactics can cross over between totally unrelated businesses.
We've taken a pretty similar approach to keeping companies honest. What we realized was that in niche markets, trust drives transactions and people are often aware that burning relationships for short-term gain has a drastic impact on lifetime value, especially if there are strong network effects.
Fortunately, we've only had to threaten to use the contractual stick a handful of times, and in each case, the mere appearance of the stick in the conversation served to recalibrate things, bringing the dialogue back to the fair center.
The cold start problem is real and one that really took us a lot of time and effort. The time spent to understand the mechanics of our marketplace manually paid itself back later on, when we realized that it helped us understand churn, and specifically how to mitigate it.
> But as a foreigner, most of the companies weren't a good fit. Some were too domestic. A lot didn't have any other westerners working there.
This is a great way to think about how important an inclusive company culture is to you - do you want your org to be thought of by non-natives like many HN posters would think of an old school Japanese one? In what ways is it unattractive to non-natives and do you actually value those characteristics?
Thanks for helping surface these. The sad fact, though, is that Japanese IT salaries even at the "good" companies are still a fraction of the global market rate.
I was recently approached for an engineering management role at the innovation wing of $JAPANESE_MEGACORP (and I see they're one of your customers!). Alas, the top of their range was around half of what I'm getting paid in Singapore, and that's before accounting for much higher taxes etc.
So to summarise: A dev turned dev recruiter who can write good content (capable of going viral) and who works with only the best companies.
You developed a simple product (extremely well tested business model and done 1000 times), used your reach and writing skills to kickstart the supply / demand and profited.
A mundane idea but executed brilliantly.
Well done and congratulations.
Considering cost of living, what salary would someone need to maintain a similar lifestyle as a senior engineer making ~$170-230k while living in a major U.S. city?
Some of the jobs on that site have salary ranges below 9 million Yen, which seems to equate to about $67k. Given that consumer goods are generally pricier in Japan, and that cost of living is generally quite high in Japan, that salary seems quite low.
I created a physician employment company which operates on the same model. I think Japanese culture has been the unsung hero here, when considering the OP company relies on an honor code of sorts.
How did you go from 12 months of no revenue to actually generating revenue? Did you provide your service for free w/o any payment options? I imagine job seekers were free to use the board but companies were required to pay to post on your board. Did it basically take 12 months to gain enough traction with job seekers to entice employers to post on your board instead of manually adding them for free yourself?
Nice work! I honesty never would have considered a job board to be able to bring such a large amount. Especially in just a few years.
Good job.
I don't think you mentioned how many employees you have? Not very many I assume if your headquarters is your apartment. Good work keeping overheads low
This seems to have been a real passion project, and seems to nearly be retirement money if the growth continues for just a few more years. Have you considered what an exit would look like?
[+] [-] Grimburger|3 years ago|reply
Something that resonated:
> We had to put 5 million JPY (~$45k at the time) in our business bank account and leave it there. For... some reason.
Living in Asia I've come across this bizarre government obsession with "money in the bank" when dealing with them:
"You need $15k in a bank account to apply"
"Ok well I have 20x that in an index ETF and it's been sitting there for a decade is that fine?"
"No you need to put that much in a bank account and leave it there for 6 months to qualify"
"What happens after the six months? I can simply take it out again?"
"Yes, that is acceptable"
[Confused Face]
No one seems to know why the rules exist, but everyone is certain there's a good reason for it.
[+] [-] wenc|3 years ago|reply
“To the state, one of the most important goals is legibility. The state has an enormous burden of regulation in its various enterprises, and the less variance the easier the job. This certainly isn’t ideal in many, many cases, but in this case a person who likely didn’t make the standards quite rationally trusts a vetted standard over one small trivial test given to them by a company they’re evaluating. FIPs standards are probably much more exhaustive than just a hashing performance test on one piece of hardware.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25543818
[+] [-] foepys|3 years ago|reply
But the government recognized that this was a problem so the "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" was made possible where you are only required to deposit 1 € initially and than can deposit more each year until you can convert to a GmbH. The UG obviously has to pay more interest on loans if it gets any at all but you are not required to be wealthy to be able to protect yourself from bankruptcy.
[+] [-] lkois|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nuclearnice3|3 years ago|reply
As an additional cross-cultural observation, 20-something western young men routinely insist on debating the merits of this policy with the impotent clerk processing their business. I've never seen the clerk unilaterally alter government policy, but the mutual exchange of Confused Face continues just the same.
[+] [-] SapporoChris|3 years ago|reply
"Documents such as a bankbook to prove that the applicant’s savings is more than 30 million Japanese yen along with the records indicating the current balance as well as deposits and withdrawals for the past 6 months."
https://www.mofa.go.jp/ca/fna/page22e_000738.html
30 million yen is currently 225k USD, but rates can change rapidly so you need significantly more just to be safe as the visa application process is long. In my experience, the "such as a bankbook" is strictly interpreted as a bank account, a stock portfolio isn't acceptable.
Now the Visa is a 1 year visa, but it issued for six months and then renewed for six months. When renewing you must meet all the original requirements. So, you can withdraw the money after getting the visa, but you need to have it back in the account when renewing! The records for six months appear to indicate that you need the money in the account for six months, but I'm not certain if this is the case.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
...who am I kidding, this happens everywhere all the time and 15K is a low amount to put in a bank account if it means someone can dodge taxes and responsibilities, lmao.
[+] [-] gjulianm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glowingly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TheTeriyakiDon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhoad|3 years ago|reply
I'm absolutely stunned that this works.
> For one thing, our contract imposes a late fee for failing to notify us of a successful hire. And the fee increases every month that they don't tell us. This is a pretty good deterrent.
Is it? It sounds like a pretty good deterrent to being honest...!
Anyway, I can't argue with the figures, if true.
[+] [-] franciscop|3 years ago|reply
Being from Spain I'm 100% a lot of the companies here would try to cheat this, but he made some good points both in the tweet answers and article; it's better to pay early and low, than being caught very late and having to pay a huge amount (don't know how much better though).
If a company retires a job without paying, I'd def spend few minutes tracking possible candidates (those who clicked "Apply" and put their data, Linkedin/Twitter/etc, follow up emails to the candidates, as he said Amazon gift card, etc).
Some might still fall through the cracks, but seems like if they get enough % of them that's probably good enough.
[1] https://twitter.com/_etdev/status/1552529476164419584
[+] [-] rtpg|3 years ago|reply
Everyone knows each other, it’s a high trust environment anyways, and it’s hard to recruit in the first place!
And like the article says, recruiting in Tokyo is kind of insanely expensive, mainly cuz it’s scaled to salary and a big chunk.
But I think the fact that this is… I mean it’s a lifestyle business? I don’t believe this is gunning for Indeed… it makes it easier
[+] [-] thematrixturtle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lozenge|3 years ago|reply
Keeping in mind that the employees are likely staying much longer than 2-3 years, because Japan.
[+] [-] 6DM|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggywiggy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polote|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|3 years ago|reply
Presumably they charge much less (10% yearly salary) than a normal recruiter would.
[+] [-] elktea|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Adrig|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
I guessed that they got paid at least partly as a function of hires, and this incentived disclosure from hirees was a way of keeping its customer companies honest.
[+] [-] jsty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j0hnyl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julienfr112|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kartikkumar|3 years ago|reply
We've taken a pretty similar approach to keeping companies honest. What we realized was that in niche markets, trust drives transactions and people are often aware that burning relationships for short-term gain has a drastic impact on lifetime value, especially if there are strong network effects.
Fortunately, we've only had to threaten to use the contractual stick a handful of times, and in each case, the mere appearance of the stick in the conversation served to recalibrate things, bringing the dialogue back to the fair center.
The cold start problem is real and one that really took us a lot of time and effort. The time spent to understand the mechanics of our marketplace manually paid itself back later on, when we realized that it helped us understand churn, and specifically how to mitigate it.
Enjoy the read!
[+] [-] sparsely|3 years ago|reply
This is a great way to think about how important an inclusive company culture is to you - do you want your org to be thought of by non-natives like many HN posters would think of an old school Japanese one? In what ways is it unattractive to non-natives and do you actually value those characteristics?
[+] [-] totetsu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incahoots|3 years ago|reply
This first one was pretty typical of the job market and it's complete disconnect of what these positions truly pay.
* Additional Information
* Gender: Male
* Education Level: Masters Degree
* Age: late 20s
* Wage 31k annually
[+] [-] thematrixturtle|3 years ago|reply
I was recently approached for an engineering management role at the innovation wing of $JAPANESE_MEGACORP (and I see they're one of your customers!). Alas, the top of their range was around half of what I'm getting paid in Singapore, and that's before accounting for much higher taxes etc.
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|3 years ago|reply
You developed a simple product (extremely well tested business model and done 1000 times), used your reach and writing skills to kickstart the supply / demand and profited.
A mundane idea but executed brilliantly. Well done and congratulations.
[+] [-] alberth|3 years ago|reply
It seems like more negative than good can come from it.
(A) if you’re in enterprise software - potential customers might be scared away by how “little” your revenues are
(b) you’re inadvertently begging for new competition when another solo developer thinks I can do better and cheaper.
Etc.
[+] [-] kairozu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atwood22|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Panther34543|3 years ago|reply
Some of the jobs on that site have salary ranges below 9 million Yen, which seems to equate to about $67k. Given that consumer goods are generally pricier in Japan, and that cost of living is generally quite high in Japan, that salary seems quite low.
[+] [-] djitz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmazingTurtle|3 years ago|reply
Nope. You want people to read your stuff? Don't force javascript onto them.
[+] [-] Pete-Codes|3 years ago|reply
Interesting business model too - either it makes nothing or big amounts of money when you get a referral
[+] [-] lovetocode|3 years ago|reply
How did you go from 12 months of no revenue to actually generating revenue? Did you provide your service for free w/o any payment options? I imagine job seekers were free to use the board but companies were required to pay to post on your board. Did it basically take 12 months to gain enough traction with job seekers to entice employers to post on your board instead of manually adding them for free yourself?
[+] [-] exnz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] presence1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] godmode2019|3 years ago|reply
Good job.
I don't think you mentioned how many employees you have? Not very many I assume if your headquarters is your apartment. Good work keeping overheads low
[+] [-] flerchin|3 years ago|reply
Such a lovely write-up. Congratulations.