Hi, my name is Drew and I am the creator of a new website called OpenSalary which I prototyped and launched just a few months ago.
OpenSalary is a site that aims to make salary data as open as possible to everyone in Japan. Basically, we just want to give equal access to information that is usually only held by a minority of individuals within companies. Hopefully this will level the playing field so that employees can determine if they are being paid fairly, negotiate offer letters and find companies that fit their career goals.
How I decided to build OpenSalary
I moved to Japan 5 years ago after spending my whole life in California and one of the things I quickly realized was that there is a huge lack of good information on companies, at least in comparison to the US. When I got my first job offer as a software engineer in Japan I asked a bunch of people if the compensation was fair, because I honestly had no idea what was acceptable or not. The thing I found out was that people had extremely different ideas of what a fair salary for a software engineer looked like (mainly based off of their own experiences).
I’ve switched jobs a few times in Japan and each time I’ve asked around what kind of salary to expect and each time I would find out that people with very similar backgrounds and skills would be paid drastically differently even at the same company (it was not uncommon that one person would be paid 50% more than the other). This happens fairly frequently because in Japan it is common to tell your current salary to the new company when switching jobs and then the company will pay you only slightly above your previous salary, even if others in the company get paid considerably more. Hearing these stories always makes me really frustrated.
At around the same time, I started to hear the phrase “salary transparency” being thrown around by the media and companies trying to create cultures of "transparency and openness”. One of the companies I heard of is a social media platform called Buffer. Buffer is really famous because of their extreme dedication to transparency, even though they are a private company they share their revenue publicly (over $20M) and real-time employee demographic data. But the most surprising thing is that they actually share all of their over 100 employees salaries publicly and their real names. You can see them on this public spreadsheet.
Seeing this kind of transparency made me really question why people feel pressure to not discuss or talk about their salary. Here are a few of the most common reasons I’ve heard (among others) and why I was not very convinced by them:
People feel embarrassed of sharing their (high) salaries and potentially making others feel bad
This is an understandable feeling because people do not want to brag, which is a good thing! However, people prefer having more information instead of less. Although someone may feel bad to find out that someone else has a higher salary than them, having this information allows them to make better career decisions. It can help inform them of the experience and skills required to progress in their career or, if they are being paid unfairly, ask for a raise or move companies.
Companies discourage people from sharing their salaries because they are afraid of competitors obtaining this kind of information
This is not a good reason. A company might say this is to avoid competition getting internal salary data since they are afraid other companies will poach employees from them. Hiding this information may be beneficial to companies in the short term, but it only hurts employees. If another company is willing to pay more for your employees, it means your company is probably not paying the market rate for them.
Companies discourage people from sharing salaries because they know their compensation system is unfair and people would be unhappy if they knew
Companies should be striving to pay employees fairly at their market value so instead of hiding the problem of unfair payment they should be openly and actively trying to fix it.
I’ve heard many other reasons as well but the more I thought about it, the more it became apparent to me that having more transparency has more upsides than cons. Ultimately, this led me to creating OpenSalary.
Benefits of more information transparency
On the flipside, here are the potential benefits of having more compensation transparency in Japan:
It empowers employees to make informed career decisions.
By having access to compensation data within their own company employees will know if they are being paid fairly or not within their company. Additionally, with this data they can understand where their career can go within their company in terms of compensation.
By having compensation data about other companies, employees can understand if they are being paid a fair market rate. If they are looking for a job change they can know what companies can support a salary they desire or the companies that would be able to offer a significant salary increase.
Finally it helps them negotiate fair salaries when joining a new company, not based on their previous salary.
It informs companies and aligns expectations.
Yes, salary transparency helps companies as well. Some companies in Japan don’t know what the market rate for certain positions should be, so they accidentally underpay or overpay their employees. Having more open data will help companies define their place in the market and pay employees fairly as well.
Additionally, when employees know the information beforehand, they already know what to expect when applying to specific companies, improving offer acceptance rate.
Lastly, employees that know they are being paid fairly will be happier and have better retention rate and long term results.
It helps the labor market and increases wages.
I think it is a well known fact that wages in Japan have been stagnant for a long time. With salary data being more open, the best talent will go to companies that offer competitive compensation and the rest of the companies will struggle hiring and retaining skilled employees unless they reassess and increase their wages to more competitive levels. This kind of information should lead Japan to a healthier and more efficient labor market.
My Goals for OpenSalary
As I wrote above, I believe there are many benefits of having more transparency, so here are the specific goals I hope to achieve with OpenSalary:
- Employees are compensated based on their value in the company, not their previous salary
- Companies become more open with their salary data, and be more open in general
- Employees will know if they are being underpaid and will be empowered to take action
- Inspire employees in Japan to find jobs and start careers that pay them their value
- Bring awareness to the salaries that are possible in Japan that people can strive for
How does OpenSalary work?
It’s really simple, there is a form that users can anonymously submit their compensation data or actual offer letters. We display this data in aggregated statistics to show high level insights into salaries by role, level, years of experience etc. But aggregated data doesn’t tell the whole story, so in addition to the high level insights, we also display the raw data points so that users can see individual examples of real offers and salaries that companies can and have offered in the past. This also fulfills our commitment of giving everyone more equal access to the same data.
I usually get questions about how the data is verified. Right now entries are reviewed manually to mark outliers and we occasionally have contacts inside some of the companies to help verify the entries.
Another thing to note is that you do not need to create an account or submit an email to enter your information. We care about your anonymity and protecting your information so, by not collecting emails, there is no way we, your company or anyone else can identify or sell your contact information. Many services also require creating an account in order to see additional information. We believe everyone should be able to access all the information on the site, so we don’t require this.
How you can help
Sharing your information on our salary submission page would be the easiest way to help. There is no login, so it only takes 45 seconds and sharing your information can benefit many others like yourself.
Another way to help is to share the site or this article with others you know to spread the message and the idea behind salary transparency.
Finally, please send us feedback on how you think we can improve the site. We read and consider every piece of feedback and it really helps us improve the site. You can contact us at [email protected] or you can tweet or send me a DM on twitter.
Thanks for reading and let’s work together to bring more transparency to the tech industry!
About Me
I grew up around San Francisco and have been around the tech industry my whole life. I grew interested in Japan in my final year of college and moved to Japan in 2015 after working in a small San Francisco startup for about a year. Since moving to Japan I’ve worked as a software engineer at small startups and large companies and currently work as a Technical Product Manager for a popular eCommerce application in Japan. Also as a fun fact, although I grew up in the US, my mother is Japanese which makes me ½ Japanese. Unfortunately, she never learned Japanese and never taught me so I had to learn Japanese on my own. Feel free to follow me or send me a DM me on Twitter.