Blissful Japan

Recently I found this article from the New York Times entitled High-Tech Japan Running Out of Engineers. (Warning: free registration and login required to read). It discusses the decreasing numbers of students choosing engineering majors in Japan. I found it particularly interesting because as an American engineer in Japan, I have long fought with the problem of the low levels of salary and pay that engineers get here compared to the United States.

I met this guy who worked at Sony designing the Playstation Portable a few years back. And he said his salary was awful, and even if the product did well, it wouldn’t impact his bonus. He said he wanted to change jobs but needed to think about it first (most people are overly cautious about changing jobs due to historical reasons.)

It seems to me that if Japan paid its engineers competitive salaries (like the U.S.), this wouldn’t be so bad a problem. But the whole situation is far more complicated than that and makes a direct comparison between Japan and Western countries difficult. Japanese companies usually don’t reward new employees with relevant preexisting skills, experience and knowledge with higher starting salary. What I mean is you could be a master programmer, and work for a Japanese company writing software and get the same salary as someone who has no experience whatsoever and has to learn everything from scratch. So for many students there is no motivation to learn anything in advance for one’s career either.