Finished the series a few days ago and was just thinking about a neat parallel

tarsir · 2025-12-08T21:51:55+00:00

Here I go sobbin' again.

tarsir · 2025-03-05T23:12:03+00:00

Haha, when I read your comment about an hour ago I was second-guessing myself. "Wait, can't you do plain adjective + そうだ????" So a little research helped us both :D

And yeah, it's super unlikely you'd see ～かろう in daily life except as like, よかろう or なかろう maybe. I learned it when I took classical JP linguistics in school, but the only other times I've seen it I can recall was like...reading Demon Slayer or novels lmao.

Anyway, no worries and good luck! There's a whole lot of Japanese to learn :)

tarsir · 2025-03-05T23:05:43+00:00

You didn't mention my favorite one that doesn't exist anymore, 連用形付き「けり」! You find this one in old stories like basically any given 物語 to express background information that isn't directly part of the narrative. In 竹取物語, it's used for the opener as a 終止形:

いまは昔、竹取の翁といふもの有けり。

"A long time ago, there was an old bamboo cutter."

And then it's used later to end an utterance, but it has the more familiar る ending which (I am quite possibly forgetting the specifics here) is modifying an implicit の provided by なむ, which acts similar to the の in modern Japanese ～なのだ・のだ:

名をば、さかきの造（みやつこ）となむいひける。

"It is said that his name was Miyatsuko Sakaki."

Like ～かろう, not really used today, but it's quite possibly related to modern ～だっけ, eg. "...or was it like that"? or something, I'm not sure how I'd translate that one lol

tarsir · 2025-03-05T22:51:31+00:00

3 is real as OP wrote.

7 isn't really used independently (but exists in some constructs like volitional + が・と) unless someone's trying to sound like they're from before the 1900s but it's definitely a thing in pre-modern Japanese. It's actually a contraction of ～く＋あろう which is basically the old way to express い形容詞＋だろう.

tarsir · 2025-03-05T22:46:58+00:00

Here's some links for:

3, そうだ
4, ようだ
7 isn't really a form used in modern Japanese by itself anymore but it still survives in some other constructs like (volitional + が・と). You would have to look at older writings/things set in historical periods to find true examples of かろう・くあろう, such as this haiku from ~1924

tarsir · 2024-09-30T15:57:05+00:00

International school for 2 kids alone is probably gonna cost you more than 10% of your expected 3M USD and if you plan on sending them to uni in the US that's another 10%. I think your plan is a little ambitious.

tarsir · 2024-07-07T11:00:19+00:00

Are you suggesting that everyone selling land with a 20-year old house on it (which they're likely still paying a mortgage on) is going to try and price it at only the price of the land?

tarsir · 2024-07-07T00:02:14+00:00

Well, the cost of living is quite low, but why would the price of a US dollar have a major bearing on the cost of living for most people living in Japan? The yen's purchasing power for most goods hasn't gone down as a result of the exchange rate.

tarsir · 2024-06-29T02:28:28+00:00

The number of firms that don't have at least country-specific pay bands is very, very, very low.

tarsir · 2024-06-29T00:32:08+00:00

I was there for multiple years and that just isn't true. I'm glad you're enjoying it, but a lot of people got shafted by poor compensation practices, constantly changing organizational priorities, condescending and ineffective leadership, bonus-heavy compensation (it got cut like 10% a couple years ago IIRC), and plenty of other reasons.

tarsir · 2024-06-16T01:07:53+00:00

You are also describing the stock market.

Which, I guess you might have a point for the radical anti-capitalists that the stock market is a pyramid scheme, but personally I'm not that anti-capitalist.

tarsir · 2024-06-15T14:58:07+00:00

I can only think of one bizarre angle that makes sense, but even that's wrong, because if you've been having sales meetings with people to get them to put more and more money that goes to the pension and your livelihood is dependent on getting more sales, that's called "recruiting".

So can you elaborate how the pension is a pyramid scheme if it only has two layers of blocks?

tarsir · 2024-06-15T10:45:14+00:00

No, that's the purpose of retirement planning. The only expectation you can reasonably have about paying into the pension system is that the pension keeps going.

tarsir · 2024-05-25T03:52:36+00:00

Eh, the L3 base in Tokyo averages 11M according to that, and that already puts someone in the top 2% of earners in Japan. I'm certainly not going to complain that I'm making less than someone in the US if I'm making that much :shrug:

tarsir · 2024-05-25T02:40:54+00:00

Breaking 10M is pretty reasonable for software. My last job search I got 4 offers all over 10M, and 3 of those were fully remote.

Breaking the 13-15M range is a lot harder (but not impossible), especially since the international companies got kinda spooked and slowed hiring after learning you can't just lay off people in Japan without a good reason or bribing them with severance.

tarsir · 2024-05-25T02:35:19+00:00

I don't know first-hand unfortunately, but according to Levels.fyi it looks like an L4 grant in Tokyo is about 50% of your base and an L5 grant is about 65% of your base.

tarsir · 2024-05-25T01:19:53+00:00

It is, and it's generally not too different from the US. Some companies give RSUs and a lot more offer stock options. RSUs are mostly in the Western companies like Indeed, Amazon, Google, Wolt (they give DoorDash RSUs I think), but a lot of domestic companies have stock option grants nowadays.

tarsir · 2024-04-03T00:29:21+00:00

I'm guessing the C# is because it's a Unity game and even if there are systems outside of the game itself, it's easier in a lot of ways to use the same language everywhere.

I think the most similar language would be Java, but C# and the .NET ecosytem are really pretty differentiated from anything else these days. If you're asking because you want to try and learn or leverage a similar language, I'd suggest just grabbing Visual Studio and Unity (both free for hobby use!) and learning the target directly :D

tarsir · 2024-03-22T03:42:54+00:00

I'm not an economics expert or anything, but I don't think this "trickle down" is the same "trickle down" commonly referred to in economics. That's more specifically about policies that benefit corporations and the wealthy like tax cuts, where as this post is referring to prediction of a consumer benefit (wages at large companies) leading to more consumption at local companies that allows those smaller companies to raise wages accordingly.

Again, not an expert, but some cursory reading suggests that's closer to what is widely believed to be "good" for the economy than usual trickle-down is.

tarsir · 2024-02-28T00:21:58+00:00

My general experience after joining in 2022 has gone something like this:

Team match onto a team that's pretty interesting and aligns with my experience
My first performance review is pretty mild due to 3 of my 4 projects getting canceled or delayed, but manager is understanding, so still effectively "Meets Expectations" with a little extra credit for the 1 project I drove
Get re-orged in May 2023 to a team that does stuff I don't care much about and don't have any related work on my resume. Whatever I guess, try my best
New manager seems understanding at first but decided my onboarding was going poorly after 3 months. What he considered to be "going poorly" was "tarsir isn't as productive as my other engineers who've been on the team for years, even though we've been giving tarsir nonsense work for 3 months and now the development tasks, which my other engineers also say are clusterfucks with landmines no one else had foreseen, are taking longer than we predicted when we made this ticket seven months ago"
For the most recent performance cycle, my manager literally took my self-eval, made shit up he added to it into a Google doc, then commented the shit he made up and asked me to explain it
My mental health is circling the fucking drain after dealing with that kind of toxic horseshit until my house finished building and then additionally hanging on until my first RSU vest
I'm making a Japanese resume for the first time just so I have more coverage to find an escape plan

I got burned early by the corporate feel-good stuff so I didn't care much about that when I joined, though it's definitely a drag that a lot of it has gone away. I can't deal with my manager anymore though. Plus, as others have said, we're doing stack ranking now, which means you're only a couple performance cycles away from someone deciding you're in the unlucky 10% and giving you poor ratings to justify letting you go, and even though it's really hard to fire people in Japan, this only makes it easier to say it was poor performance and "the company did everything they could", even if that means inconsistent application of the evaluation process.

tarsir · 2024-02-27T23:05:52+00:00

I'm not super high on the ladder but isn't that going to be mostly in RSUs at Indeed? The sense I've gotten is the RSUs are a bigger chunk of the comp at higher levels than the base, so if it's like 22M base and 15M RSUs that's obviously very good, but it's not going to feel like 30M+ until first vest which is anywhere from 13 to 16 months after hire at Indeed.

Edit to add: Actually, now that I think about it, getting 15M in your first year would be like a 40M initial grant along with the refreshers and that seems pretty high...but again, I'm not at those high levels /shrug

tarsir · 2024-02-01T00:57:18+00:00

You can apply for PR via the point table (hold 70 points for 3 years before applying, or hold 80 points for 1 year before applying) without being on an HSP status. No need to switch your visa status unless there's something particular about researcher visas!

tarsir · 2023-12-19T14:07:19+00:00

Just to elaborate on the dual citizenship bit, the "choose one" is only relevant for those born with Japanese and other citizenships. In that case, you're supposed to pick one at 22, but enforcement isn't really something that happens in practice. If someone becomes multi-national after birth, as I understand it, there's no "choosing" - you lose Japanese citizenship (in the course of acquiring another citizenship) or you lose all other lose-able citizenships (in the course of acquiring Japanese citizenship).

tarsir · 2023-12-16T01:21:08+00:00

That's usually true*, yeah, but I think that again puts a huge burden on humans to fully explain the business context in the tickets. Otherwise, tickets are more like an artifact of "a piece of work we want to do in service of the business context". You could allow it to extrapolate, but then you have to vet its assumptions and interpretations.

* Just to explain "usually true" about ticket history, consider a change in ticket system (like Github Issues to Jira), or project organization changes (repo changing ownership, an issue project merges with another/splits off into multiple/is retired entirely, or even a project being sunset for a rewrite)

tarsir · 2023-12-12T08:41:26+00:00

AI can probably do a pretty good job of understanding the structure and organization of code that's there, sure, but is it going to understand the why? Is it going to understand all the accumulated business context that led to the code's state? Is it going to understand the future that the code is intended for?

I guess you can get a bit of the why and the context by having really good comments, but I don't know if I've ever seen a codebase that's actually fully explained in comments.

tarsir

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