etdev's comments

Hey -- author here

Working remotely for a US company from Japan is great if you can swing it. Especially now with the weak yen (assuming you earn USD).

The main issue is getting a visa. Unless you have a Japanese spouse or Japanese citizenship/permanent residency, this is a major barrier.

There are a few paths though.

1. For big companies like Google or Indeed, you can try for an "intra-company transferee" visa. The company has to have a Japanese corporate entity and you have to work for them overseas for 1 year first.

2. Your company can use an "EOR" (Employer of Record) service. Basically a 3rd party company in Japan that employs you on behalf of your actual employer, and sponsors your visa. Your company pays the EOR company a fee.

3. Start your own company in Japan and work for your previous employer as a contractor through your Japan entity. This is generally expensive and requires you to deal with an accountant etc, so not a great option for most people.

So if any of those sound like options, then it may be possible. Usually the more experienced and valued you are by your company, the more likely it is you'll be able to do it.

I'll add this info to the post too, thanks for your question!

> And I think the answer is the language barrier.

This may contribute, but it's not the main issue imo. I've worked with tons of Japanese devs and English didn't hold them back much.

Plus look at Ruby, which was all the rage in webdev at one point. It was invented in Japan, and it had better documentation in Japanese than English.

Bigger issues for Japan's tech industry in 2023:

- Lack of VC/Startup investment (0.02% of GDP vs. 0.52% for USA)[1]

- Lack of government support

- Lack of strong CS university programs

- Risk-averse culture (failure is congratulated in the US but condemned in Japan; people don't want to risk building a startup)

- Continued prevalence of "System Integration" rather than in-house dev teams

- Outsourcing of dev work to cheaper countries (India etc).

- Difficulty of moving to Japan (visa issues, high taxes etc; hard for immigrants to start businesses here)

[1] https://www.boj.or.jp/en/research/brp/ron_2021/data/ron21031...

To see your page content, crawlers need to load your JS and wait for it to hydrate the page.

Google does this (but it's still not ideal). Most other crawlers don't. That means they won't see your rendered content.

This becomes an issue with sharing on social media, because your meta tags won't be read properly. If you share a blog post on Twitter for example, it won't be able to fetch your og:image, title etc so it won't look good.

To fix that, you have to use prerendering or server-side rendering. I'm doing hacky stuff with prerendering inside a Cloudflare worker where it detects that it's a crawler and prerenders the page if so.

SPAs also tend to have slow initial load times, which is becoming increasingly important for SEO. You can't avoid at least one additional network call after loading the initial HTML, and if you're not careful you can end up with chained requests for different components etc.

For sites like mine that rely on SEO and social media, it's a pretty big annoyance.

We made it free to post jobs, and then charged a fee upon successful hire.

So that made it a win-win for companies. We promote your jobs for free, if you don't hire anyone you've lost nothing, and even if you DO hire someone, it's for a lower fee than you're used to paying recruiters.

So the hard part was actually attracting applicants. Ultimately we used SEO + blogging, our email list, a bit of paid advertising and a few other channels to get a good amount of traffic. But this takes a long time when you start from pretty much 0.

Yeah these are good points, I guess if the yen never recovers you'd take a hit. The current exchange rate is an outlier though. At least historically, you've had the chance to convert back at between 100-110 JPY:USD every few years.

There are tons of caveats with cost-of-living. But for me personally, I worked for a company HQ'd in Palo Alto from Japan. And I looked into moving. I calculated that I'd need an extra $50k or so on top of my Tokyo salary to maintain the same lifestyle in Silicon Valley.

That's for me though. If you want a car no matter what, or you buy all your food at import markets, or want a huge apartment in the center of town exactly like the one you had in the US, Tokyo gets expensive. International schools for your kids can also get really pricey.

But if you live relatively closely to how locals do, it's cheap as hell. Seriously. The rent for my nice, new 2BR in central Tokyo is ¥190,000 a month. That's $1,416 at the current exchange rate.

The going rate I saw in Silicon Valley for a similar place was around $4k. And you absolutely need a car there, which means gas and insurance too. Here you can get anywhere super quickly via train, and companies pay your commuting costs if you're not WFH. Plus food is WAY cheaper here in my experience (I paid ¥950 for a big lunch today, tax included, no tip. 7 bucks all-in.)

So YMMV but that pretty much covers the $50k for me.

Cost-of-living comparisons get complex, but I can give you my personal opinion.

Let's assume SF vs Tokyo.

To live the same lifestyle and have the same amount of disposable income as someone earning $170-230k in SF, you'd need to earn ¥12-18M or so in Tokyo.

You can live in a nice apartment in the center of Tokyo and still save a lot of money as a single person earning ¥12M a year.

Also the yen is super weak against the dollar right now (historically so). So converting to dollars doesn't give an accurate value imo. As long as you earn and spend yen, what matters is purchasing power parity. Not the exchange rate.

To me, living in Japan, ¥9M still "feels" roughly like $90k despite the exchange rate.

Yeah definitely.

I just used the stack I was used to, didn't really turn out to be the best stack for the job...

Kubernetes is completely unnecessary, although I do enjoy using it.

Having a separate API is kinda nice. I could easily spin up a different front-end like an iOS app and share the same API. And I can write all the server code in Ruby instead of JS, which I prefer to do.

But yeah overall, way over-engineered.

Yeah they do.

Established companies will have at least one senior HR person who can OK that level of spend.

Small startups might need approval from from an exec like the CTO.

30-35% is pretty standard though so most companies will have a process for it.

Thanks a lot!

I'm not really thinking too deeply about exiting yet. But I guess if I wanted to work on other things, the main options would be:

(1) Automate + delegate as much of the work as possible to decrease my time commitment and gain some freedom

(2) Try to sell the business

But for now I'm just focused on improving + growing the business!

Great, really glad to hear that!

Is it possible you have Javascript disabled?

Unfortunately it's an SPA so it requires JS. I regret this decision...

If not then it might be due to an ad blocker issue (specifically triggered by social share buttons) I just discovered from this thread and need to look into.

Sure! I started out on MailChimp, but recently switched to Bento (https://bentonow.com/)

I really like it.

Thanks a lot!

Here's the basic stack:

• Rails API

• Vue SPA w/ ViteJS

• MySQL

• K8s on Digital Ocean

• Cloudflare worker + caching

• Bento for emails

• Algolia for search / filters

I wouldn't recommend using a client-side rendered application for a project like this though... that was a mistake. Tons of headaches with SEO, social media sharing etc.

The site is a Vue.js single page application.

That's just the front-end stack I knew the best — I realize it's terrible for those who don't want to run javascript. Sorry!

Interesting, can you let me know which ad blocker so I can try to reproduce?

Oh wow thanks for checking, that's helpful to know.

I should probably restructure things so that one component failing doesn't bring down the whole site if I can...

Thanks! Yeah, the space has gotten pretty crowded but it can still work really well if you niche down imo.

And I niched down hard.

Yep this is a major part of my strategy (Hi, I'm the guy who built the site).

Like I mention in the post, I have emails, names and URLs for everyone who applies.

I also know how many applicants it normally takes to get 1 placement. So I can easily check which jobs are getting a suspiciously high number of applicants with no successful placements.

And I can reach out to all those applicants with the gift card offer, or take other measures to gather data about them and cross-check it with the company name etc.

This plus the late fee plus the fact that I'm in Japan makes the business model viable.

Weird...

I did recently switch to hosting through a Cloudflare Worker, so maybe it's a caching issue. Is it possible you've viewed the site before? If so maybe you have an old version of the index.html file in your browser cache that's linking to the wrong assets.

Either way thanks for reporting — I'll look into it!

You don't need Japanese skills to find a job here.

Check out these sites for jobs from English-friendly companies:

- https://japan-dev.com

- https://tokyodev.com

And FYI: living in Japan is nothing like visiting Japan. But working as a dev here can be a rewarding experience.

Good luck!