Top IT talents are highly sought after amidst today’s fierce war for talents, and Japan is jumping on the bandwagon of global hiring drive to snatch the best technology engineers, competing with the talent market in the U.S and China.
A Japanese company Start Today Co., which operates popular online fashion shopping platform Zozotown, recently posted new job openings on Monday (Apr 2) to call for seven “genius” tech experts to join the team. In its offerings, the company says it will grant new hires with annual salaries of as much as 100 million yen ($944,000), Bloomberg reports.
According to a blog post, the listed company which has $8.4 billion worth by market capitalisation is currently looking for IT staffs in some fields, ranging from artificial intelligence to cryptography and robotics.
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Many see this as an unusual move in Japan, a country where its workers opt to choose job security offer high salary. That being said, workers are often willing to take lower pay in exchange for secure employment in the longer term. This attitude is evident even among the relatively well-paid IT professionals, with top software engineers ‘only’ earning on average about $113,000 a year. This amount is two times less compared with the $250,000 employees in the same level can receive in the U.S., according to hiring firm Robert Walters.
Commenting on the matter, head of tech hiring at Robert Walters Japan Tomokazu Betzold said that there was no precedent for this move. “There’s a long-standing stigma that Japanese companies don’t pay competitively. So this is a really positive development,” he said.
Meanwhile, increasingly soaring salaries for tech experts are becoming the norm in China, where compensation at one of the nation’s largest startup can exceed $3 million. In the U.S., one engineer at at Alphabet’s self-driving unit is reportedly able to make more than $120 million, surpassing the nose-bleed figures offered to some top Wall Street traders.
“As a developer in Silicon Valley you’ll get a chance to earn more than in Tokyo,” said Betzold. “But Japan can still be comparable depending on the position.”
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