A Year of Job Hunting in Japan
Internship
In the summer of 2022, I participated in interviews for summer software engineering internships at three foreign companies in Tokyo: Google Japan, Microsoft Japan, and Indeed Japan. I received offers from Google Japan for their Google Maps team and from Microsoft Japan for their Windows operating system team. Since I received the offer from Google first and signed the contract, and then received the offer from Microsoft about two months later, I didn’t really have a choice. I had to politely decline Microsoft’s offer and join Google’s summer internship. However, it wasn’t until a few months after completing my internship that I realized there was no need to make an either-or decision. There’s a method (which many people do) to have both: intern at Microsoft during the summer and intern at Google during the winter. Microsoft’s recruiter told me that I had to intern during the summer, but Google doesn’t require candidates to intern specifically in the summer. There is certainly some regret, as I missed out on an internship opportunity. However, the summer internship happened to be before the downsizing period, when everyone was in a good mood, so the internship experience was fantastic. The issue of student and work visas in Japan is simple and straightforward. I just needed to ensure that I was within the school’s designated vacation period (as stated in the academic calendar) during my internship. This allowed me to work a maximum of 40 hours per week, making me a full-time intern. My winter and summer breaks were both two months long – not too short, not too long – and I didn’t need to worry about visa complications.
Reflecting on my internship search experience, I found that there are limited long-term internship opportunities in Japanese foreign companies, but the competition is fierce. After Microsoft extended offers, they held an offer meeting event, where I noticed they selected only a handful of people… Google had a significant number of internship positions, but they were still relatively limited. The proportion of Chinese interns was quite low, with the majority being Japanese – which is understandable, as opportunities are equally available to all candidates in Japan. The outside world often mocks Japanese people for their poor English, claiming that if Chinese people apply to foreign companies, the competition wouldn’t be as intense. However, in reality, talented Japanese individuals often possess fluent English and extensive experience, making them formidable competitors. Compared to the United States, where there are often thousands of interns, Japan’s absolute numbers and proportions are much smaller, and I often feel that luck plays a bigger role. I once read a Japanese Google intern’s interview experience on a website. Coincidentally, we were in the same application batch, and even more remarkably, one of the interview questions he shared was identical to one I encountered. However, he did not pass the interview. Based on his description, I pondered the possibility that we both provided optimal solutions, but I may have executed slightly faster, completing the question ahead of him… Of course, this can’t really be considered a measurement criterion. I speculate that when the recruitment purpose is less critical to the company and there is an excess of candidates, unconventional methods are used to filter applicants.
Fulltime
After completing my internship, I began preparing for full-time positions once again. Due to the employment market turmoil during my internship, I had to reapply to nearly all companies in Japan that I found interesting and offered acceptable salary levels, including foreign companies, major Japanese corporations, and start-ups. This turned out to be a very prudent decision.
Google didn’t open external applications this year, but they allowed interns to continue transitioning to full-time roles. Google’s full-time transition process is lengthy and somewhat daunting, involving collecting evaluations, passing the hiring committee review, team matching, and receiving an offer. According to the regular process, Google interns need to go through the hiring committee review, which evaluates whether they can transition to full-time based on feedback from mentors during the internship. There are three evaluation outcomes: 1) Passed 2) Requires additional interviews 3) Not passed. Fortunately, after my internship, I received very positive feedback from my mentor. I was informed that I could skip the hiring committee review and proceed directly to the team matching stage. I completed my internship in late September 2022 and was notified in early November that I entered the team matching stage. However, for the next four months, there was no communication. It wasn’t until May that I received notification about team matching. Unfortunately, the result was disappointing – I didn’t even have a chance to speak with a recruiting manager, and the team matching attempt failed.
By the end of 2022, I also applied for a software development engineer position at Amazon Japan. I applied rather casually and without much preparation, passing the online coding test and behavioral interview test. Later, I learned from a friend that I was the only batch of applicants who could take the online test. Amazon later stopped sending the online coding test to interviewees and closed applications. Amazon’s rhythm was similar to Google’s. After the turmoil in the job market last year, Amazon didn’t contact me for an interview until February of this year. At the time, I was still caught up in the hope of successfully transitioning to full-time at Google, and I went to the interview with very little preparation. Because I was unprepared, I was likely the first among all candidates to interview. The interview date was the earliest available, and the questions were not difficult but somewhat beyond my expectations – I thought only Google would ask such quirky questions. After the interview, I waited for two months, until about a week after receiving Google’s notice of the failed team matching, when I received a verbal offer from Amazon.
I hadn’t done much practice before the interview, but I did some intensive preparation in the two days leading up to it; more than anything, I marveled at being in the right place at the right time before the interview.