After college I spent a few years teaching English in Taiwan, then returned to the US and found work as a tech support and QA person for an asp.net web application at a small software company. I have been working in this field for 4 years and am currently an escalation resource for our customer-facing technicians, which means that most server-side work and any issues that cannot be easily resolved by following a script are escalated to me. I am mostly self-taught in IT and have been very successful professionally despite having no IT or CS-related degree.
So, everything’s great, except that I’m about to marry my Taiwanese girlfriend and while she is willing to live in the US she would like me to at least try to find a job in Taiwan so she can be near her family. There’s no way on Earth that I will consider teaching again. Although I am very good at my job the only way I keep up with my formally-trained colleagues is by constantly researching and studying on my own time, so I wonder whether my skills are enough to compensate for the language barrier-- My Chinese is pretty terrible.
I have a degree in a liberal art, but not in anything IT related
So, two questions:
Do I have any hope without further professional development, degrees or credentials?
If not, what path should I take? Bachelor’s in IT, CompTia, Microsoft certs? Would they be of any use in Taiwan?
if you are gonna teach a degree is needed for a Visa. If no degree no visa. The type of degree doesn’t matter. There is practically nothing else you can do here apart from teaching. There are exceptions, I suspect you will not be one of them. If you want to work in IT I guess you might as well set up your own business, web-based of course. Be prepared not to have any control over money/taxes/etc and have everything in your wife’s name.
Thanks. I guess what I’m asking is, can a run of the mill IT guy get a job in Taiwan without good Chinese skills, or should I pursue further degrees/credentials, and if so, what kind are respected in taiwan?
Surely you can work remotely with this type of job, the pay will be much better that way anyway. You will have no work restrictions if you are married.
run of the mill IT guy? I really hope that’s not on your CV
From my experience there is alot of IT work here but you will up against degree educated (very possibly masters educated) Taiwanese who will probably have a vocational degree. Plus they can speak Chinese. Plus they’ve been coding since they can crawl. Plus they may well work for less than you would consider a decent salary especially for their first job.
So, it could be tough. However, all is not lost.
If you get a JFRV (marriage visa) after you get married you have the advantage of not needing a work visa so that at least levels the playing field a little (otherwise a company must sponsor your visa which costs them extra money)
I would suggest you get really good at something in short supply here and work that angle. Anything web-related and/or iOS/Android would be a good place to start I reckon but maybe you can find something a little more niche. I cannot be any more specific as I was looking myself for more generic project management, rather than specifically technical, work.
Microsoft and other professional certs would be better than more college degrees IMO.
Other things you could look at would be self-study through stuff like coursera if money is an issue.
I agree with HH. You’d be better off getting an online job and continuing to work for a Western company. You won’t be able to compete with locals at that work level, and if you could, you wouldn’t like the salary or the working conditions.
Software developers make much more than others here, though I do not know if you are one. A foreigner will usually ask for 100.000+ which is why I am not interested in hiring foreigners. A Taiwan guy will present me with a CSC master from California, giggle in the interview and knows hardly anything I ask him or her, even if the CV states this as the field of expertise. Meaning you will have a disadvantage when applying without IT credentials as the locals have shitloads of credential papers but hardly know what they are about.
Had this Novell-certified Linux administrator who thought the cat command made an animal-like sound (he ticked that in my test ).
Edit: Sorry, did not see the orig. posting is so old.
I’m a bit confused you said you don’t hire foreigners but that the cheaper local laborers are unqualified in practical terms. So wouldn’t it actually save you money to pony up for foreigners who know what their doing than paying for cheap but incompetent labor?
Maybe you can meet in the middle? Btw 100,000 USD a year is pretty low for a dev now so it actually sounds like a pretty good deal to me
Yeah maybe. Anyway I came here because I just applied to a TrendMicro (says this word is not allowed not sure why) position and wanted to find out a bit more about it. For example, what do salaries look like/what should I expect if I end up getting an offer. My field is UX research. The salaries I see on Glassdoor seem incredibly low so I’m hoping it’s just an error. In the United States, it’s 3-4 times what’s mentioned on Glassdoor. I expect the salaries to be much higher in America, but 3-4 times seems excessively low
I do have experience in IT, just not in UX (I have research experience but only academic so far)
I interviewed there many many years ago. My impression was it is not a bad place, but very typically Taiwanese. You may be expected to clock in and out, for example. Other than that I cannot say too much about them. I think they are (or were) on Dun Hua Nan Road next to a car garage. I think I thought about joking with them about how in my home country IT job interviews frequently happened at the car garage too, like … pick one out. I think I decided against bringing it up
Back when I was on Tinder, seemed a lot of girls were in the field. Market might be saturated for designers. I dont have knack for it myself, but probably isn’t hard to get a credential and a little experience
Sorry not design but research which is closer to data science than design. Although, for this position it’s a UX writer job so it’s a specialist position for technical writing.
Rough haha. Well maybe it’s not the best fit. I was hoping for somewhere more flexible since I’m also working on my PhD. I just need to take 2 classes a semester during the week
).