What about non-steady income from freelance or independent contractor work?
I am in similar situation as you. My research in Expat positions online make it seem like these packages are pretty common but haven’t actually hear/seen many people talk about it.
Hey I had a go at doing a little statistics on the dataset, you can find an extra sheet in there.
First issue is that 25% of the salary numbers are not correct number formats (so mixed up syntax), if the owner of the sheet could fix that I would be able to include more data.
Second thing is that salaries do not follow a normal distribution but are skewed to the side of the few large numbers. Nevertheless you can find a plot and graph below.
So the Median is 75 000 NTD/month, meaning half of people earn more and other half earn less.
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They still exist but they aren’t common I would say.
Nice work.
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Am I the only one thst looks at that table and thinks it is really depressing? How can Taiwanese live and thrive on 33k NTD is bad. Assuming they have family support is worse. A foreigner making 33k is also troublesome. In general I find the work and salary situation disturbing.
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I think a better definition would be that these are common benefits for a relocated expat, but the number of positions offering them is limited and not high.
Used to be 22k was the starting salary for everyone who is Taiwanese, no matter if he has a bachelor’s or phD.
You can live on 33k if you’re really frugal, but otherwise with a family this is asking for trouble. You ever wonder why few Taiwanese want children? This is why.
With wage like this, who wants to study and work hard? You make 33k working full time at starbucks!
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Out of curiosity, what kind of tech jobs do foreigners typically get in Taipei? Do you get sent abroad by your company or go to Taiwan seeking?
I get the feeling barring certain exceptions, teaching English is the only jobs foreigners can come seeking. If you get a foreigner working at TSMC they’re likely sent over from abroad. I mean why would they be looking for foreigners in Taiwan? Who are they going to find, some random guy who came here on vacation or is looking for a teaching job?
And those foreigners will have the cushy package.
What kinds of jobs is it? Programming? Engineering?
I don’t know, I guess it varies from engineering to management.
But usually jobs like that aren’t advertised in Taiwan.
Given a number of people here have those kind of jobs, maybe they can answer.
Maybe it would change if the data was larger than few hundreds
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My company approached me on my current job. I act as the liaison between the engineering group in the US and suppliers in Asia, underneath there is also a small group of locally hired engineers.
They wanted someone from headquarter instead of hiring local, which would have been significantly cheaper, because they needed someone who understands the company culture and product development process.
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Are you gonna ask the same question to everyone making shit money in every country? Because there are a lot of them.
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Sure but not every country is the world’s 17th economy with a 3%yearly growth. Taiwan can and should do better.
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Leaving aside the specifics of percentages, I would say that—like elsewhere in this broken world—the gains in Taiwan are NOT going to salary earners.
For a primer on why is this not a good situation, interested forumosans could have a look at Guy Standing’s sobering book The Precariat.
Guy
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Taiwan is not the world’s 17th economy. More like 21st. 1st to 20th all have far larger population except Australia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Besides, the size of the economy has nothing to do with how much people earn. India is the 6th largest economy, for example.
3% annual growth is not that high, nor is it pertinent to income.
How can growth not be pertinent to incomes?
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