TokyoDev Developer Survey 2023

2.6% of respondents were unemployed, up from 0.5% in 2022.

19% of respondents were actively looking for a job, up from 11% last year.

Data Scientists or Machine Learning Specialists were by far the most likely to have a postgraduate degree, with 72.8% of them achieving a Masters degree or above, compared to 32.8% of respondents overall.

Engineering teams tended to be highly international, with only 18.4% of respondents being on a team that was all or mostly Japanese.

Respondents on a team that was primarily Japanese had lived in Japan longer, with a median of 7 years compared to the overall median of 4 years.

54.3% of respondents worked in an environment where all or most of the non-engineers were Japanese.

54% of respondents never or rarely used Japanese professionally.

Those who used Japanese frequently reported lower salaries, and were most likely to be working for a company headquartered in Japan.

Only 12.7% of respondents never or rarely used English professionally.

Inversely to Japanese usage, respondents who used English frequently reported higher salaries, and were least likely to be working for a company headquartered in Japan.

79.4% of respondents worked 8 hours or less in a typical day.

While 33.2% of respondents working at a company headquartered in Japan were hired via an external recruiter, only 18.5% of them working for a Japanese subsidiary of an international company were.