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I am quite bearish about the impact of WFH, especially for software engineers, but if there is one country where I think the coronavirus can have a huge positiv

• zkid18 6y ago
  I wouldn't interpret 飲み会 in that way. Yes people drink there but I wouldn't claim that women abuse is somehow common there. From my experience Japanese are quite polite even if there are drunk. Disclaimer: Gaijin, working in Japanese company
  • cdavid 6y ago
    I have seen behavior that would be guaranteed to get a sexual harassment suit in the US in pretty much every company I worked at, big and small, public and private. That starts to date now but I have been at karaoke parties where some guys would be naked w/ a sock on their dick dancing. I also had to several times make sure women would get back safely because some colleagues clearly tried to get them to miss their last train and go to a love hotel. Japan is a country where still today politicians can say that women after 40 are useless because cannot procreate. For the very few public sexual harassment affairs, the common defense of the perpetrator is to claim the woman was looking for it. It is victim blaming all the way down.
• chrisseaton 6y ago
  How does this square with for example the Japanese car market, which I thought led the world in labour practices and efficiency? They've invented many labour practices that are considered the best we have today. And their cars are so cheap - how are they doing this if they aren't being efficient? For example are Toyota's engineering and factories running on wasted meeting time, fax machines, and hand-written letters? Doesn't seem likely. If they are it seems to produce great results!
  • pault 6y ago
    I believe that's an issue of manufacturing efficiency vs. corporate efficiency. Toyota invented "lean manufacturing", but that doesn't mean that their biz dev, marketing department, etc isn't massively inefficient. I'm not saying they are, just that the two are orthogonal.
  • cdavid 6y ago
    So manufacturing is generally quite efficient. Toyota would be one of the powerhouse I had in mind, as would be most car companies. Note that Toyota is very much a global company and under the pressure of competition worldwide. But many large Japanese companies aren't. >For example is Toyota also thriving on wasted meeting time, fax machines, and hand-written letters? Doesn't seem likely. I don't want to go too much in specifics, but the examples I gave are actually coming from a company whose sole client is a large car company.
  • jbay808 6y ago
    The inefficiency is generally limited to white collar workers. Japanese blue collar workers are very efficient. Also, internationally competitive companies like Toyota often (but not always) have better business practices.
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• 0xCMP 6y ago
  When I visited Japan I couldn't help repeating over and over to myself that it's a country with one foot firmly in the future and another foot stuck firmly in the past. It's one of the most fascinating things I love about Japan. [edit: typo]
  • benmw333 6y ago
    What struck me was the seemingly 1995 era laptops people were working on in the trains.
    • yaktubi 6y ago
      I like 1995 era laptops more than modern ones. I also like the the plastic casings of desktops back then—they feel solid, same with the mechanical keyboards! Today companies so busy trying to “slim things down.” P.S. why doesn’t apple release a matte display laptop? I would buy it.
      • stx 6y ago
        I had one of the last models of matte display apple released. I eventually gave it up for the retina resolution.
      • asdff 6y ago
        Apple used to release matte display laptops. You used to be able to get a hulking 17 inch macbook pro with an optional matte display. Today, you can buy a $15 matte film.
      • dungdang 6y ago
        because the reason matte is matte, is that it scatters light hitting the screen. from either side of the screen. you didn't notice how blurry your screen was when it was already blurry from the low resolution. now screens have high resolution. feel free to put a matte transparency on your high density screen to make it a low density screen. everyone else would rather have glare.
    • SenHeng 6y ago
• celim307 6y ago
  This bleeds into their North American operations too. Nowhere else in my career have I seen a more wretched hive of incestual politicking, inefficiency, lack of respect for lower workers, and obsession with beaucracy at Panasonic’s American operations
  • pkaye 6y ago
    Reminds me of when my past employer sent me to Japan to debug a firmware issue for a potential customer. Every day for a week I had to spend two hours talking to their engineers talking about my debug decision tree for debug work for the rest of the day. And that was with an English/Japanese translator to help communicate. Most people adapt their debug strategy as they collect more data but they wanted it all planned out ahead. A very different way of doing it. The bug was very specific to their use case and they wouldn't help us replicate it in our labs so I never figured it out until a year later helping another customer. It was a bug in counter wraparound handling.
    • pezezin 6y ago
      I have been working as an IT guy in Japan for almost two years now, and that's pretty much my experience. Everything has to be explained in ridiculous amount of detail and hanko-stamped by 20 bosses before you can start doing anything. Which is quite ridiculous when your work strategy needs to change as you collect more data, as you said. I'm learning to just do my job without telling them anything, and later writing all the required documents.
      • newyankee 6y ago
        So the question is how do these companies still manage to sustain competitive pressures ? I guess the answer is that once you have a moat, internal efficiency is not that big of a factor.
        • pezezin 6y ago
          I work for a public research institution, so I can't tell you about private companies. My guess is that, because everybody does the same, the don't feel any pressure to improve.
• baron816 6y ago
  There was an Economist article on this exactly: https://www.economist.com/business/2020/05/09/japanese-offices-struggle-to-adapt-to-social-distancing https://www.economist.com/business/2020/05/09/japanese-offic...
• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  > Especially women are often relegated to menial work I think this is the phenomenon you describe (Office ladies): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_lady https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_lady But not all women are like this. There are career oriented women that are not interested in menial work or becoming housewives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyaria%C5%ABman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyaria%C5%ABman
  • stu2b50 6y ago
    There's a difference between being relegated and being interested. He's saying that current business culture causes many women to work menial office jobs, not that the women themselves are not ambitious.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  >There is a culture of overwork that begets a culture of inefficiency that boggles the mind. Few people know that Japan has a labor productivity lower than Italy, for example. If you spent so much time at the workplace like the Japanese you end up with a low producivity on paper pretty much by definition, because it's simply output divided by amount of time worked. But I wouldn't overestimate the importance of computerization on productivity which is actually extremely low. Here in Germany we have a similar paper culture (although not quite as extreme) but very high labour productivity. The Japanese could simply go home or work a day less and their productivity would go up, it's not really comparable to much of Italy. (except the north of italy which is actually also extremely productive). In fact Microsoft in Japan actually did just that and introduced a 4 day week a while ago, and productivity went up 40% (https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-says-4-day-workweek-boosted-workers-productivity-by-40?t=1594057642190 https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...)
  • cdavid 6y ago
    >If you spent so much time at the workplace like the Japanese you end up with a low producivity on paper pretty much by definition, because it's simply output divided by amount of time worked. It is not as simple as that: in general, more developed countries tend to have higher labor productivity. Japan has been historically low for several decades. I'm no specialist of labor statistics, but note that Japan actaually worked fewers hours than Italy , accoding to OECD anyaway: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS. I am pretty sure that most people unfamiliar w/ Japan would not place its productivity as low as it is, close to countries like Turkey or Slovakia. >Here in Germany we have a similar paper culture (although not quite as extreme) but very high labour productivity I am familiar with both countries, worked in both, and it is nowhere near comparable. But paper is only part of it. The overtime culture is quite intense. I still vividly remember my first work experience in Japan > 15 years ago, with 3-4 hours-long meetings where half the members, including the lab's head, were sleeping.
    • SenHeng 6y ago
      The BBC also has an article on this topic of sleeping in the office. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190809-why-overtired-japan-is-turning-to-office-siestas https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190809-why-overtired-...
• nikanj 6y ago
  Japan exists simultaneously 100 years in the past, and 100 years in the future. Averaging out it's still like living in 2020, but for each small interaction you never know if you'll be facing the 1920 experience or the 2120 experience.
• VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
  They also care very much about their job title, and the job titles of the people they are dealing with. A few years ago my company (American) worked with a Japanese company and before we went into the meetings we had to establish new job titles for the people on our team that would be representing our company in the meeting. We couldn't go in there with just a bunch of senior engineers when they were sending their VP of Engineering. It wouldn't have gone over well.. We had to have a Director of Engineering, Senior Director of Mobile, VP of North American Engineering. Etc. These were all just regular very good senior engineers. But it would have been insulting to go to the meeting without the inflated titles.
  • cosmodisk 6y ago
    It would be funny if that wouldn't be so widely spread in other countries too. I have a fancy title that sounds nice on various levels. People's attitude changes completely: they listen to me,some even try not to say something wrong and etc. Oh, and I'm popular amongst sales people,who want to sell me all sorts of solutions because they assume I sit on a big budget. It's a circus.
• danonino 6y ago
  So you watched some hentai and now you're a Japan expert? Give me a break.
• SillaDeRuedas 6y ago
  So you watched some hentai and now you're a Japan expert? Give me a break.
• subsubzero 6y ago
  Really interesting comment, I know a bit about the salary-man culture with business men asleep in subways/alleys as they had dinner drinking sessions that extended past the last subway ride back to their home stations. I wonder how this practice came to be culturally? Was it something that manifested after WWII where the country felt like it needed to 'catch up' to the US and other allied countries? Or was this always a thing there? As for paper, calligraphy is a revered art form there, as well as stationary and writing letters. So being really into paper and forms does not surprise me.
• golemiprague 6y ago
  This is not entirely accurate, travelling for 3 hours is not very common, most people travel less than an hour and they do it on a train where they can read or play or listen to something, it is not that bad comparing to the US where most people drive to work and waste a lot of their time. After work dinners/drinks are not every day, maybe once a week or two in average and are actually a lot of fun for most people. Regarding women, the Japanese women do the same work women do in the west only in Japan they give it the true name, "office lady" which is equivalent to secretary rather than some fancy "document controller" or "diversity officer". The ones who actually do non secretarial jobs are titled and respected exactly like their male peers, at least at the places where I worked. Many Japanese women choose to raise their kids rather than spend their life in an office, they contribute more to the economy by doing this than many office ladies and I wish more people in the west will realise that women are not that beneficial to the economy as we like to think they are. They don't create new businesses, they don't innovate and they are good only for very specific jobs, the rest are are net loss comparing to an housewife from a pure economic view. That's why also buying an apartment in Tokyo is cheaper than most other major cities, because the prices are adjusted to one person working in an household, not to two. The Japanese mix old wisdom with new tech, that's why almost anybody who get a chance to live there is amazed by their lifestyle and the way everything is working. It is true conservatism as it should be, slow progress while taking into account the wisdom of past generations, especially when it comes to social changes. That's how you end up with a society where you can forget your purse in the street and find it the next day in the same place or the police box, rather than 70% out of wedlock pregnancy rate and lives that matter, or not.
• zanmat0 6y ago
  >abuse toward women common source please, there's no need to add baseless trivia to underline your point
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Sort this table[1] on the last column and see how far down Japan is. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report#WEF_Global_Gender_Gap_Index_rankings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report#WEF_G...
• danielscrubs 6y ago
  I got it explained quite simply by: digital signatures is by law not valid in court. Which would explain the paper use. Don’t know if it’s still true though. Usually things that seem inefficient boils down to law in the end.
  • fomine3 6y ago
    It's valid now.
• garfieldnate 6y ago
  I worked there under a very common payment model called みなし残業 (minashi-zangyou), meaning my contract gave me a minimum monthly pay which assumed a certain amount of overtime (40 hours a month in my case, meaning no additional pay was provided until surpassing 40 hours overtime in a month). This was really awful because I could be made to feel guilty for not staying late, and superiors had no qualms about keeping me. I naively accepted the contract (it was a permanent contract, highly sought after) and at some point realized that the pay was not at all worth it (about 42k a year). This was not the kind of job I could sleep at, either!