I thought I was going to just miss being able to say this, but five customers bought copies of BCC overnight. This brings BCC sales for February to $2,925.
Now, looking at my February pay stub (which is pay for work done in January), the before-deductions sum of everything (base pay, housing allowance, travel allowance, overtime) is $2,890.
This isn’t quite as impressive as it might sound at first blush: Japanese salarymen generally get a biannual bonus which generally at my company amounts to 2.25 months of base pay each time, where base pay is about 75% of that top-line number. It also doesn’t count that I had to pay expenses for BCC this month ($995), doesn’t count that self-employment would raise my taxes relative to regular employment, etc.
Still… yikes. (I won’t tell you how many hours are required to get either of these numbers… principally because the difference is too depressing for words.)
Incidentally: the total salary of a programmer in his mid/late twenties in Japan is generally somewhere around the 4 million yen mark (~$40k USD). It is considered fairly good for someone that age. We’re crazy underpaid next to engineers in America, I know, I know — my family reminds me frequently.
