etdev

Hey -- author here

Working remotely for a US company from Japan is great if you can swing it. Especially now with the weak yen (assuming you earn USD).

The main issue is getting a visa. Unless you have a Japanese spouse or Japanese citizenship/permanent residency, this is a major barrier.

There are a few paths though.

1. For big companies like Google or Indeed, you can try for an "intra-company transferee" visa. The company has to have a Japanese corporate entity and you have to work for them overseas for 1 year first.

2. Your company can use an "EOR" (Employer of Record) service. Basically a 3rd party company in Japan that employs you on behalf of your actual employer, and sponsors your visa. Your company pays the EOR company a fee.

3. Start your own company in Japan and work for your previous employer as a contractor through your Japan entity. This is generally expensive and requires you to deal with an accountant etc, so not a great option for most people.

So if any of those sound like options, then it may be possible. Usually the more experienced and valued you are by your company, the more likely it is you'll be able to do it.

I'll add this info to the post too, thanks for your question!

To see your page content, crawlers need to load your JS and wait for it to hydrate the page.

Google does this (but it's still not ideal). Most other crawlers don't. That means they won't see your rendered content.

This becomes an issue with sharing on social media, because your meta tags won't be read properly. If you share a blog post on Twitter for example, it won't be able to fetch your og:image, title etc so it won't look good.

To fix that, you have to use prerendering or server-side rendering. I'm doing hacky stuff with prerendering inside a Cloudflare worker where it detects that it's a crawler and prerenders the page if so.

SPAs also tend to have slow initial load times, which is becoming increasingly important for SEO. You can't avoid at least one additional network call after loading the initial HTML, and if you're not careful you can end up with chained requests for different components etc.

For sites like mine that rely on SEO and social media, it's a pretty big annoyance.

We made it free to post jobs, and then charged a fee upon successful hire.

So that made it a win-win for companies. We promote your jobs for free, if you don't hire anyone you've lost nothing, and even if you DO hire someone, it's for a lower fee than you're used to paying recruiters.

So the hard part was actually attracting applicants. Ultimately we used SEO + blogging, our email list, a bit of paid advertising and a few other channels to get a good amount of traffic. But this takes a long time when you start from pretty much 0.

Yeah these are good points, I guess if the yen never recovers you'd take a hit. The current exchange rate is an outlier though. At least historically, you've had the chance to convert back at between 100-110 JPY:USD every few years.

There are tons of caveats with cost-of-living. But for me personally, I worked for a company HQ'd in Palo Alto from Japan. And I looked into moving. I calculated that I'd need an extra $50k or so on top of my Tokyo salary to maintain the same lifestyle in Silicon Valley.

That's for me though. If you want a car no matter what, or you buy all your food at import markets, or want a huge apartment in the center of town exactly like the one you had in the US, Tokyo gets expensive. International schools for your kids can also get really pricey.

But if you live relatively closely to how locals do, it's cheap as hell. Seriously. The rent for my nice, new 2BR in central Tokyo is ¥190,000 a month. That's $1,416 at the current exchange rate.

The going rate I saw in Silicon Valley for a similar place was around $4k. And you absolutely need a car there, which means gas and insurance too. Here you can get anywhere super quickly via train, and companies pay your commuting costs if you're not WFH. Plus food is WAY cheaper here in my experience (I paid ¥950 for a big lunch today, tax included, no tip. 7 bucks all-in.)

So YMMV but that pretty much covers the $50k for me.

Cost-of-living comparisons get complex, but I can give you my personal opinion.

Let's assume SF vs Tokyo.

To live the same lifestyle and have the same amount of disposable income as someone earning $170-230k in SF, you'd need to earn ¥12-18M or so in Tokyo.

You can live in a nice apartment in the center of Tokyo and still save a lot of money as a single person earning ¥12M a year.

Also the yen is super weak against the dollar right now (historically so). So converting to dollars doesn't give an accurate value imo. As long as you earn and spend yen, what matters is purchasing power parity. Not the exchange rate.

To me, living in Japan, ¥9M still "feels" roughly like $90k despite the exchange rate.

Yeah definitely.

I just used the stack I was used to, didn't really turn out to be the best stack for the job...

Kubernetes is completely unnecessary, although I do enjoy using it.

Having a separate API is kinda nice. I could easily spin up a different front-end like an iOS app and share the same API. And I can write all the server code in Ruby instead of JS, which I prefer to do.

But yeah overall, way over-engineered.

Yeah they do.

Established companies will have at least one senior HR person who can OK that level of spend.

Small startups might need approval from from an exec like the CTO.

30-35% is pretty standard though so most companies will have a process for it.