The last source actually presents a table which shows "Education" is the best paying field for women, whereas "Finance/Insurance" is the best paying field for men; and "Information services" is not the best paying field for either sex, although it is near the top. In the USA, in contrast, "Education" is definitely not competitive with tech as far as salaries.

These are not the kind of sources I would use to study these things, by the way, because they break things down by industry or profession rather than role and these sources use incredibly broad "industry" and "profession" categories.

If you know of better sources, I'd love to take a look. I can read Japanese, but I'm way better at searching stuff up in English.

You are looking at this differently than the parent post. You are looking at cross-industry inside Japan. Parent is talking about inside Japan vs outside Japan within the same industry/job.

If you look at public data on somewhere like levels.fyi, there's a big gap in pay even within the same company, at the same level. I'm most familiar with Seattle comp, and same tier of SDE role is a 30+% paycut from Seattle to Tokyo at FAANG companies.

I also know someone who left a FAANG company here to go work in Japan for awhile. They had to move from SDE to Data Scientist + got a senior role at the new company, and even then they struggled to get anywhere close to their previous comp.

I don't see that. I believe parent comment is also talking about "cross-industry inside Japan".

> Salaries and prestige are relatively low for *developers in Japan*, so it's relatively easy for other jobs to compete for prospective workers and *draw them away from technology*.

I agree that difficulty attracting foreign talent is a problem for the Japanese tech industry, but I don't think it's the focus of the article or the focus of the parent comment.