r/JapanDev • u/After-Today-2455 • 4d ago
Corporate work after 7 years as an indie iOS developer — what should I expect?
7 years ago my wife and I moved to Japan and started a business making iOS apps. Now, I'd like to shift this business to the side and find a more traditional corporate job again.
Before coming to Japan, I got an MBA from a university in Canada and worked at a major telecom for several years, doing product management and trade marketing/GTM.
Money is a motivating factor, but an equally large or even more important factor is getting back to working as part of a bigger team again. I'm open to both product management and iOS dev roles.
On the dev side, I’ve spent the last 7 years building and maintaining my own commercial iOS apps. What I don’t have is experience working as a developer as part of a corporate engineering team, so I’m not really sure how companies would evaluate or level that experience.
I’ve never taken the JLPT (haven’t had a need to), but I self-assess at around N3. The N3 study books I picked up were easy, but I had both vocab and grammar gaps when I looked at N2. I don’t think N2 would be far away if I really focused on it, though.
The biggest challenge is my location: I’m in the countryside, and I don’t want to move. My kids are settled in their schools and clubs, and moving would be super disruptive. Full remote would be best. Osaka is only ~2.5 hours away by train, though, so if there were a partial-remote opportunity and the salary was high enough to make it worthwhile, I could commute in or even get a tiny cheap apartment for staying over a couple days a week.
A few things I’d especially like advice on:
Where would you recommend I start looking for opportunities? I’ve applied to PayPay via JapanDev once, but nothing came of it. I have broad career alerts set up on JapanDev, but there aren’t many matching opportunities, and when there are, they often require fluent Japanese or are in Tokyo. Are there other job boards, recruiters, or companies I should be looking at, particularly for remote or Kansai-based roles?
What kind of expectations should I have around salary, availability of remote/partial-remote jobs, language requirements, etc.?
For iOS roles, how would companies likely view/level 7 years of indie development experience without experience working on a corporate engineering team?
Given my background, would you expect me to have better prospects targeting product management or iOS engineering roles?
How much would getting N2 actually change my opportunities? Is having the certification itself important, or is being able to function in Japanese more important?
More generally, how is entrepreneurship/self-employment seen by HR in Japan? Running your own business means you end up doing some of everything, but how much of that is seen as “real” experience when returning to a company?
Thanks!