US-born software dev / entrepreneur in Japan. https://xitter.cf/t.co/RzFdR4oudJ In Tokyo? Hit me up ☕ 😁
Tokyo, Japan
Joined February 2014
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I'm on the @IndieHackers podcast! 🥳
🇯🇵 Moving to Japan & starting a business
💰 The long road from $0 to $80k a month
🤝 Learning to sell as a developer
🚀 Playbook to grow a job board in 2022
share.transistor.fm/s/cfdf12…
For anyone with TS/JS + Rust experience:
Seems like a great opportunity in Japan ⤵︎
It appears that I’m hiring. DM me if you want to work together.
job-boards.greenhouse.io/clo…
Nice. Next step: Steam for AI games
Host your own games. Provide tools to help others build + publish their games
Free or paid. Leaderboards, sharing features and stuff
Wonder if anyone's built that yet... feels inevitable with how good AI is at games now
For decades, everyone dunked on Japan for "missing" software.
"They're too obsessed with hardware..."
"They rely too much on System Integrators..."
mfw everyone in SF is either pivoting to hardware or hiring SIers (*they call 'em FDEs).
Good point! Agreed.
You can ask about this in interviews, but it would be nice to know earlier in the process.
No, pretty much every tech / knowledge work-focused company here gives Saturdays and Sundays off.
A long time ago it was more common to work on Saturdays, so companies still write "Saturdays and Sundays off" in job descriptions.
It doesn't tell you anything about the company.
I'm not saying bad companies don't do these things.
I'm saying they provide no signal. You shouldn't NOT apply for a job because of them.
And to find actual "black companies" you need to look a lot deeper.
3. Late example work hours in job descriptions, e.g "10:00 am to 7:00 pm"
Doesn't mean everyone works until 7. It means "you'll work 8 hours + 1-hour lunch"
So if you start at 10 (late), you end at 7.
That's what it's meant to communicate, not "they think 7pm is early" or w/e
2. "Minashi zangyo" (built-in overtime)
At least in tech, nearly every company here has this. Bad companies have it. Good companies have it.
It doesn't mean you'll be doing overtime.
Plenty of companies with little-to-no overtime still have minashi zangyo.
Japan job-related things foreigners think are red flags 🚩but aren't:
1. Saturday and Sunday listed under "holidays"
Means nothing, just how employers write JDs. Holdover from when Japan had 6-day weeks (rare now)
A template. Doesn't mean they're "proud" of giving weekends off
That would also work!
But I just made a folder and had Claude build an extension that did what I wanted
When it finished, I enabled Developer mode in Chrome and loaded the unpacked extension
Now I just ask Claude to add more functionality to that extension and it auto-updates
Underrated AI use case:
Maintain a personal browser extension.
And just... change websites whenever you feel like it.
Takes no time at all. AI updates the extension, which auto-refreshes
E.g I added an Old/New Toggle to my Reddit and a "Resolve all" button to my Github.
Super subjective of course but
Outlier salary at a good company in Tokyo is a top-tier lifestyle worldwide imo
Definitely! Forgive me my ignorance 🙏
I had never really interacted with the brand outside the news outlet + didn't understand the extent of the business