> Pay is bad though

I wonder if that is in any way correlated to this:

> Gov't study finds only 3,065 homeless people in Japan

https://japantoday.com/category/national/gov%27t-study-finds...

There are probably more than 3000 people just trying to live out of net cafes. Pay is bad for SWEs because Japan mostly doesn't have the sorts of companies that generate millions in profit per SWE, and foreign companies lower their offers to be only a little above the local market rate. Pay is bad for other workers because huge amounts of labor are wasted on tasks like "staying at the office at least as long as my boss" or "replacing our successful product with a new one for the sake of demonstrating that we have done something" which are optimized for purposes opposed to creating value.

First, that number is most probably understated.

Second, your comment could be interpreted as saying that counties with high pay have (or should have) a lot of homeless people, which seems insane. So what did you mean?

It’s not that insane. If pay is low then companies can afford to hire more people to do the same amount of work, leading to overall more employment and then presumably less homelessness.

Unemployment is just one factor in homelessness. Other factors are drugs (Japan is much more stricter), home availability (Japan has much less NIBMYies), etc.

Also most importantly the ability for the state to declare you mentally unfit and hold you against your will.

If you're being held, do you fall under homelessness?

So, this happens a lot if Japan? Examples?

>Second, your comment could be interpreted as saying that counties with high pay have (or should have) a lot of homeless people, which seems insane.

Does it? Countries with high inequality I'd expect to have a lot of homeless people.

Except if you mean countries with high pay across the board. So how does that work, everybody gets high wages, and companies can afford it and hire the same number of people, (instead of the case of splitting wages more equally)?

That's one of the last things I would wonder.

The full quote is:

> Last Friday, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare released the results of an annual study of the number of homeless people *in the country’s parks and riverside areas.*

So this isn't the full count of homeless, just the ones living in specific park areas.

Where else are they going to live? Unlike America, Japan doesn't have massive homeless encampments full of tents in random places all around the city, so they generally all congregate in certain parks where their presence is tolerated. From my experience living in Tokyo, I'd say that looking at those parks and riverside areas is a very accurate way of counting the number of homeless.

Pay wasn't horrible 30 years ago when I was there; but after 30 years of ~0 inflation...

> They always respond to applications.

That's not true. YC startup Tailor, the first (and only?) Japan startup that YC funded, left me on read on LinkedIn. They ignored my application without a response, too. Pretty confident this company discriminates against non-Japanese.

To be fair, the whole American tech culture of inclusitivity is not really a thing in Japan or most Asian countries. My freind works as a designer at a bank's tech arm, and told me wild stories of coworkers parading their sex videos around the office. Her boss straight up told her she was hired because she pretty, and that he was proud of forming a team of models (both male and female). I talked to other people who worked in East Asia, and they found these stories to be unsurprising.

>Pretty confident this company discriminates against non-Japanese.

Why do you think that? Was the job requisition in English? Did it ask for Japanese proficiency? If the answers are "yes" and "no", respectively, then it's very unlikely they're discriminating against non-Japanese for that job. If they don't want to hire non-Japanese, they'll simply post the job in Japanese only, or put "Japanese language proficiency (N2 or better)" or something like that in the ad. The reality is that not that many companies have an English working environment; this is a country where the national language is Japanese, and not that many people speak English well, after all.

Could it be because there are no automated systems?

The pay (for tech jobs) isn't that bad compared to other peer nations. It's bad everywhere, compared to the US, where salaries are much, much higher than pretty much everyplace else, except possibly Switzerland.

However, the cost of living is much lower in Japan than in the large tech-hub cities in the US (and probably even mid-tier cities). Life in the US is really expensive these days.

Compared to the US, tech salaries in Switzerland are pretty bad unless you work for a big US tech company that has their hq here.

However, salaries in general are high. Tech salaries are just not significantly higher like in the US.