I’m a software developer from Moscow (Russia) with more then 7 years of experience in .Net development. I’m constantly looking for the openings in Japan, but I’m left with the impression that most of the companies that are interested in foreign specialists are b2c startups. I see lots of Go/Python/Ruby cloud-based solutions, but very little Java/C#/C++/C/Erlang/Fortran “Enterprise” jobs (companies with their private data centers/backbones/networks processing huge traffic and doing heavy number crunching, like stock exchange/global bookmaking/b2b real-time analytics/security/etc). Do big Japanese companies hire locally? Or maybe I don’t know where to look?
Don’t get me wrong: I’m more then fine with startups, it’s just that they often do not need the technological stack I’m proficient in for obvious reasons. Any advise on where to look for .Net middleware/back-end jobs in Japan is really appreciated. Thank you.
When I first got here in 2006, jobs in finance were almost the only opportunities I could find in English. I heard that with the the 2008 market crash, many of the international finance companies pulled out of Japan though.
I never worked directly with enterprise finance companies, but I did some consulting for other enterprise companies with opperations in Japan. Though they had sales and marketing in Japan, they didn’t have any developers here. Rather they were using in house teams in the US, and outsourced developers in places like China and India.
Japanese enterprise companies themselves tend to be conservative, and so I don’t see them doing a push to hire foreign developers like startups do.
I’m sure the kind of opportunities you’re looking for exist though. I suspect the companies are using recruiters as their main channel though, which is probably why you haven’t been able to find them. I don’t have any experience working with recruiters personally, so there’s not one I can recommend.
Thank you.
I guess I’m gonna continue trying companies in high-tech manufacturing or real-time analytics fields as they sometimes use .Net to manage modeling/testing AFAIK, and they seem to have openings that explicitly mention their readiness to hire from abroad. The fact that most of them use custom in-house HR portals was an unpleasant surprise for me though ^_^.