How common is it for a company to give a maximum of 8 months bonus in Tokyo?

[truth239]

@neuric My 100% target bonus is about 6 months, but the past few years I've been getting around 8 months due to a combination of my own performance and company doing well, so definitely can happen. Total comp is about 15m.

 

[baltazaresguerra]

@neuric Yes, it is possible for large companies to give out such big bonuses for regular employees (especially large tech companies). My year-to-year average bonus have always hovered around 6-8 months.

The main downside however, is that the bonus is going to be based on your performance and you would never know for sure if you’re getting the higher end of the scale.

What you need to clarify is, what is the baseline expected bonus for someone who performs “on target”, and how this will be evaluated for you personally. Then you want to check how much is based on personal performance and how much for company performance.

For example, in one of my previous companies the policy was 80% based on personal performance review, 20% on company performance. Baseline for someone on target was 4 months, and for the highest evaluations it goes up to 8 months. Depending on the company this can be very transparent and open information, so all you got to do is ask.

 

[resjudicata]

@neuric It's uncommon, but not impossible.
My previous company gave out 6.6 months of bonuses per year some time ago.
Now my friends who still work there, said this year it will be probably reach 7.8 months bonus per year.
It strongly depends on their sales.
Since manager salaries are strongly regulated in Japan, high profit is often passed on to the employees.

 

[silverfinch]

@neuric If they say it’s UP TO XX months, expect it to be very rarely given to only handful few. Ask about their evaluation system and how many months the middle range is and that’s what you’ll get about 90 percent of the time you spend with the firm.

 

[neuric]

@silverfinch They specifically mentioned it's around 4-5 months

 

[interesting2]

@neuric I just had a few questions,

1. What is the role offered? Like Senior Software Engineer, etc.
2. How many years of experience do you have?

 

[albinoguitman]

@neuric The bonus has 2 disadvantages, specially if you were in IT where people tend to stay under 5 years in a company (heck, under 2 years in the USA), but something I've seen very commonly in Japan:

• Usually you don't receive the "first bonus" that could be e.g. 1-3 months after you join, since you were not there for the whole period.
• Usually if you want to quit, do it after receiving the last bonus, otherwise if you e.g. give 2 months notice and your last bonus happens within that period, you will also not receive it.

If the bonus is annual, that is a lot of money to be missing. With bad timing at hiring/leaving, you can miss almost 2 full bonus. What do you prefer, to potentially miss 4 months of bonus or 8 months? So as others have said, purely from the money point of view the 10.3 is a lot safer/better.

Since you have nothing to lose with company B, how about counter-offering them? 11M annual + 4 months bonus? (I hope you didn't disclose your "offer from competitor", but from how razor-thin the margin from those two offers is I fear you might)