"Traditionally, salarymen (and they are, by the way, mostly men) are hired into a particular company late in university and stay at that company or its affiliates until they retire."
"The employee hereby promises the company: Your first obligation, in all things, will be to your company. You will work incredibly hard (90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment) on their behalf."
"Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake rather than because it actually accomplishes more productive work. Depending on one’s company, this overtime may be compensated or “service overtime” — “service” in Japanese means “thrown in for free in the hopes of gaining one’s further custom”, so your favorite restaurant might throw in a “service” desert once in a while or you might do 8 hours of “service” overtime six nights a week for 15 years."
The whole post is a great read that comes from a first-hand experience.
> > Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake
> That's just stupid.
That's overtime. Almost all overtime, even in the US, is as much about the appearance of working hard rather than any real gains in productivity.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been involved with or seen a startup that "crushes code 100 hours a week because we're out to win, man", with most of those late nights spent with a room full of people online shopping or on HN.
I'm productive for about 20-35 hours a week I'd say. Based on how interesting the problem is and luck. The other hours I spend trying to wade through my own feelings about being unproductive.
That's the thing though, it's an old-school Fordist concept that doesn't really apply to modern service/creative jobs. Time, like place, is not related to productivity anymore, modern employers need better metrics.
True. OP said overtime NEVER works. I think it works. Just differently in different fields.
I can code 80 hour weeks for a bit. Put out a ton of code. Can't do it for a month straight. But I could do manual labor overtime for a month straight.
Mm, yeah, manual labour is kind of a different story. I'm thinking programming or more generally knowledge-economy work. We have fairly precise numbers indicating that productivity goes net-negative when working much beyond 40/week after at most a couple of weeks.
You probably also earned additional pay (at a higher rate) for overtime - which can help justify spending the extra time there, at least if you value the money more than the free time lost. Which doesn't apply to salaried employees.
Yeah my current startup, no overtime, and all our projects are on schedule, everything is going great. Previous company required 80-100 hours a week basically for show, they would break more than got fixed because at 100 hours a week your body and brain reach the breaking point, completely unproductive.
I worked in Japan for a year at a 100 person startup (all Japanese people except for me). Anecdotally, people did seem to work a lot of hours but it was also felt like one of the most laid back environments in a way. It seemed like working all those hours allowed them to not be rushed. They were also pretty successful, and had as one of their goals to be like a "San Francisco startup" which may have made them a bit more of an exception instead of the rule. Also I worked primarily in SF at a lot of startups so that made it an easier transition for me.
I definitely saw salarymen on trains falling asleep or all heading out in packs to bars though, so I have no doubts about there being a very hard-working middle-class that also has extra-office obligations.
Reminds me of some college cultures actually. In architecture school you were almost expected to pull all-nighters for the sake of "being a dedicated architecture student". It is like hazing of some sort.
Never once pulled an all-nighter in college (ECE). I also never studied for more than 2-3 hours in succession. I always took a nice break between study sessions to let everything sink in.
On the other hand, most of my peers consistently stayed up through the night during examinations. Most of my peers studied in groups. I sat in on a few sessions and discovered that for every hour of study, an hour was spent on petty discussions. I stopped attending them since.
I'm now doing a PhD, so that may all change. I did fine during my first semester, so we'll just have to see.
YMMV - I was in college for six years, got a BS and MS in CS.
I was surrounded by people who, like you said, regularly stayed up all night prior to exams. Sometimes we even scheduled that: the students would organize study-group sessions from 10PM-til.
I had a policy then that, no matter what, I was going to get a full night's sleep. Period. Full stop. I think it served me very well. A quick refresher in the morning gave me probably as much recency in terms of memory, and personally, my brain just works a lot, lot better with plenty of sleep. Even if I didn't know an answer, it was a lot easier to stay calm and rationalize something that often turned out to be right or good enough.
I only felt a little bad about it once - in a math class I left the study group right before my bedtime, while still getting the notes they'd put together the rest of the night. I felt a little uneasy about not pulling my weight, so to speak, but oh well. It could have been scheduled earlier and I would have gladly stayed.
So I'd keep it up.
Nowadays things are a little different for me - a lot of my job unfortunately involves being present regardless of whether there's anything to actually do. I worked two-and-a-half days straight a couple months ago. No overtime pay. :\
> I had a policy then that, no matter what, I was going to get a full night's sleep. Period. Full stop. I think it served me very well.
I'm exactly the same! Unfortunately, sleep is extremely underrated nowadays.
Someone on Quora asked Jimmy Wales (yes, it's a thing) what he regretted not doing enough during his youth. His answer was getting enough sleep. His argument was that, as you grow older and get more responsibilities, you'll get less and less sleep, so why not get the most rest while you can?
> Even if I didn't know an answer, it was a lot easier to stay calm and rationalize something that often turned out to be right or good enough.
That's a very valuable skill in my opinion, and I think it carries over well to stressful situations in general.
I also never pulled an overnighter. I also never studied for more than 2-3 hours. In fact, I never studied for more than 15 minutes nor go to classes! (Semi) unrelated, I failed a lot of classes, dropped out and got a real job paying well doing something I love, ahead of many of my 'classmates'
Learning and study, along with their career path, is different for everyone.
I had a similar experience. Even through my PhD at a top-tier school in applied math, I didn't do "all-nighters" or cram sessions. In fact, after my first 2 years of PhD (where I regularly put in 80 hours a week because of the course load), I toned it down to 40-50 hours. I also didn't use performance enhancing drugs meant to treat things like ADHD.
I did (and still do) use a lot of coffee in the mornings. I also recommend going out to bars to have those petty discussions, so that socializing is reliably separated study.
Haha, yeah, I get you. It's probably because I don't like spending more time than necessary when it comes to studying. I'm a really heavy procrastinator otherwise.
Just out of curiosity, how old are you/when did you attend college? I ask because "back in the day" everyone knew.
If you were a cs student in 1995, you pretty much had to work in one of the basement labs. One of the profs liked to come to the lab at 3am before a deadline and laugh at us.
I was CS from 88-91 and everyone knew since we were either in the basement of one building or lab in another. Plus, everyone knew if you were online if you had the cash to be logged in from home. The joys of classes taught on an IBM 370 or VAX.
The social aspects of the old labs made for many memories and lessons.
I started my CS degree in 95, and did most of my coursework from my dorm, telnetting in to one of the Sparcs we were expected to write code on, eventually using X11 forwarding too. Wasn't any different resultswise than sitting with everyone else at terminals in the lab, though I guess I missed out on the social aspects of plowing through assignments in the same room together.
Yeah technically you could telnet in or do a remote X11, but you'd have to telnet to one of the machines in the lab, that someone was working on. So their processes would get priority since they were on the console, and sometimes people were asses and would boot you out so they could compile faster.
Also we didn't really have many people with laptops, so if you had a group project meeting in the lab was pretty much the only way you could all get computers but still interact with each other.
The crappy thing is that while this might be "back in the day", I still have to spend time cooped up in computer lab because software companies make the licenses way too expensive so we have nowhere else to do our homework.
Yes, this is a common theme for noobs everywhere. The older, cooler guys will let you in -- after you've been through the ringer and proven you really want to be in their special club.
That would have been tolerable for me, but considering I have been experiencing difference in overall sociological expectations by just visiting there, I don't know if I would have been truly happy if I were in that situation. I wasn't exactly "fit to their spec" back when I was living in Japan at young age, either.
And that somewhat aligns with my experience; perhaps the way personal relationships work probably more about where the company is located rather than who owns it.
For what it worth, I work for a wholly owned subsidiary of Japanese company in the States and I'm doing very well :-)
We are lucky enough to work in a very modern field with a different mindset in contrast to other jobs.
I'm at my 3rd company in Japan now and while some of my previous experiences were bad, it was really more the fault of the company with things you could easily find in other countries as well and not "because Japan".
A friend told me about their time in a New York finance company, where people showed up to the office on Saturday and watched TV on their computer because even if there wasn't any work to do you had to be seen putting the time in.
Most banking analysts (read: first 2 years out of college) have similar need to have 'butts in seats' for ~ noon to maybe 4 pm. In the morning you have to finish the work you didn't finish last night or your boss wants redone, and you get more work around 4 or 5 when the older people start leaving. But there's a few hours midday where you have absolutely nothing to do except browse the internet or try to sneak off to the gym.
Talking with recruiters there it sounded like it depends on the company more than the employee (traditional Japanese companies expect more 'loyalty'/hours than young and/or foreign-founded companies). However I've also heard that foreigners can 'get away' with more, whatever that means.
Expats often have "I'm not Japanese" as an excuse and a lower expectation of conformance.
To be clear this is not just a company issue it's a cultural issue. If the company does not have a policy of "go home at 6pm" the default culture everyone expects is "work late", especially for men.
Generally Japanese companies will send their liaison to the host country and having experienced this first hand I can say that liasions are expected to be available throughout the Japan day time.
After visiting Japan on several occasions for company related work, I can confirm this is true. However, there are labor laws that prevent certain types of workers from working overtime or even the weekends. However, the labor laws do not seem to apply to the management. Unclear on how the law works, but these were my observations.
Yes at some companies you start as a member of the union as a junior employee (even if you're an engineer or finance person), and after you're promoted to a certain level, you're part of management and are no longer part of the union.
My American brain tells me this is an insane way to live. No work life balance. It's horrible inefficient, as you can't downsize, or compete international like this. You're forced to hangout with coworkers.
However, having this long term stability with work is something that is sorely missed in the US. A pension? Job for life?
If you have a 401k benefit, you have a portable pension that you can take with you from job to job -- roll it into an individual retirement account when you're done.
If you don't have a 401k benefit, you can fund an IRA yourself.
Many folks are learning the hard way that you really don't want to bet your retirement on a single company remaining both solvent and honest for the next 70 years.
I'm young (24), so I guess I'm coming from a different mindset (entitled millennial here!), but the thought of working at a single place for life gives me nightmares.
Sure, companies 'evolve' (for better or worse) and theoretically your job changes as you climb the ladder, but surely you job learning and loving work if you do the same thing for 40+ years?
I guess this is the difference between people who see work as an obligation vs an opportunity.
University jobs as well. Almost no way to get fired, unless you are just flagrantly negligent. Huge amounts of paid time off, generally flexible hours. Middling salary but generally great benefits. Boring but stable and predictable. Some people like that.
Dentsu is exhibit A for what's wrong with the Japanese work environment. This isn't the first time they've been responsible for an employee's suicide through overwork. This young woman's tweets before her death are pretty revealing. References to her male superior telling her that she can't hack it because she's a woman, the toxic seniority system where you can't question those above you, 20+ hour days. Just awful.
How long until people just start passively disobeying? I mean, if the choice is death by overwork or loss of career (maybe ending in death due to homelessness)...
There are lots of reasons people choose not to seek jobs. A person can just look at their parents, decide they don't have the fortitude or attitude to integrate into the sarariman lifestyle, and rationally opt out.
PROTIP: one can look for remote programming work in the U.S. or Europe, earn a decent living, and still engage in a NEET lifestyle. I have a steady diet of HN, anime, Perl, and reclusiveness and it works great for me.
For context, from the article: "Takahashi had clocked about 105 hours of overtime in the month leading up to her death, authorities found."
Japan has a 40 hour work week and a max of overtime a person can volunteer for. In a month this limit is an additional 45 hours. An employee can agree to more overtime but the source refers to some labor safeguards that are supposed to kick in: https://www.jetro.go.jp/en/invest/setting_up/laws/section4/p...
So in essence, she worked more than double the allowed overtime (around 65 hours per week total work time).
Many Japanese companies pressure their employees to report significantly less hours than they actually work. So not only will they work you to death, they are stealing money from you along the way.
If the Japanese are working so much that some a literally working themselves to death - why is their economy so bad? My guess is that a lot of that time is getting used up with unnecessary busy work rather than actual productive labor.
I recently switched jobs and now work 35h/week instead of 40. I get a lot more done in those 35 hours now than I did previously in 40.
The worst productivity I ever had was in frantic overtime rushes at the end of projects. There's definitely a link between working hours and productivity.
One of the most baffling mysteries of our time for me is the fact that this truth (more working hours = less productivity) is still being massively denied and the non-existent and strawman "arguments" against it have been beaten to death and debunked thousands of times... yet never fail to reappear in any discussion on the topic.
It seems the economic pressure for supporting this bullshit story is still too strong. Sigh.
Maybe it's because there's a lot of confusion created by people who claim that there's an inverse correlation between hours worked and overall productivity, instead of hours worked and marginal productivity. I have no trouble believing that (on average) someone who works 50 hours doesn't accomplish 25% more than someone who works 40 hours. I find it almost impossible to believe that they don't accomplish more overall though.
And this fits the data: why would companies not dramatically push people to work fewer and fewer hours for this magical increased productivity that you're claiming? They could market it as a perk AND get so much more done!
What I think is happening: there's little cost to companies to encourage workers to work 60 hours instead of 40. Sure, they won't get 50% more done, maybe only 20% or 30%, but the company doesn't pay overtime, so that's a free 20% or 30%.
Of course, there's some point at which overwork does start to impact overall productivity vs standard-40-hours, but it's much, much higher than 40 hours. This study [0] seems to indicate that little extra gets done from 55-70 hours, but from my reading, that still doesn't indicate that someone working 70 hours gets less done than someone working 40 hours. Looking at figure 4 in that study, it looks like you'd have to go to 90-100 hours to see output drop back to 40-hour levels.
It just seems ludicrous to me to suggest that for the population at large, working 40 hours is the optimal amount, such that anything less will result in greater overall productivity, and anything more will lower overall productivity. Really?
Exactly! My 60th hour might not be as productive as my 20th hour, but it is productive nonetheless.
Currently leading a team I see different behavior from team members working longer hours. For example, we had a conversion to do that was running into a deadline. Together with a team of 4 we worked into the evenings to get it done. 2 of them 'compensated' by being there but browsing more Reddit, the other 2 actually sat down and got the work done.
I see a lot of comments justifying the first kind of behavior, and it doesn't make sense to me. If you are not productive because you are on HN, you're doing that to yourself. At 40-60h we're in the realm of that being a choice, and then you're choosing not to be productive.
FWIW, I'm not trying to justify people working long just to show that they are there/committed. That's a terrible practice too.
I have no problem at all with you disagreeing, but you do make it sound like your point of view is an universal truth -- which it isn't.
In software development, I'd argue there's rarely a significant difference between marginal and overall productivity. It really boils down to personalities however, let's be real; and I am not gonna claim my point of view is universally true because it too isn't.
The more and more you work, the more BS you start to produce. You are tired, you start to imagine your bed (or girlfriend, or TV, or whatever floats your boat) and you start putting less thought into what you do and just go into "spear mode". One of my former managers used to say "If I see you tired, I prefer letting you go at Friday 14:00 so you don't spend your entire Monday fixing the bugs you introduced during the second half of that Friday".
This is a real phenomena. Granted it doesn't apply for everyone, but IMO you discard way too quickly those of us that do need some freedom and some "slack" to actually be more productive. And it's very generous to call the normal legal requirements not to work over 40 hours a week "slack".
This is also real: when I am having a very hard time and I can't solve something and I get nervous and stressed out, and if you're my manager and tell me "Dimi, just call it a day right here, you can do it tomorrow" -- you can be VERY sure I'll do it tomorrow. While conversely if you tap me on the shoulder 10 times for the remainder of the day, I can guarantee you I'll get absolutely nothing done. Different strokes for different people.
So no, "the free 20-30%" isn't something that the company can get from everyone.
If your point of view is right, wouldn't it imply that working 30 hours per week is ultimately more productive than 40? What about 10 hours? What about an hour?
Or are you actually in agreement about the shape of the productivity vs hours worked curve but you disagree where the peak is for software developers? If so, where is that peak do you think?
Of course I am not talking about barely working at all or some miniscule amounts of hours, come on now.
It's the latter from your comment -- I disagree where the peak is for software developers. But I can't give you absolute numbers that I can claim are true for everyone. There's no such thing. I am a proponent of the per-individual approach.
That being said, if we try and devise a good median number -- I've read quite a few articles several years ago that claimed that 27-32 hours of work are not only the peak of the programmer's productivity but that's also the working schedule that makes people want to work more in their free time. So in terms of your "free 20-30%", for people like myself a 30-hour work week would likely result in free 50% once every several weeks.
Not feeling forced into unproductive schedules gives your brain and psyche a good leisure time during which you occasionally find yourself thinking about the work problems in a chill state -- and it's also often the case you reach for your laptop on the couch to try and solve them outside of the working hours.
Again, it's subjective. I knew several people who worked best when they were given tight schedules and impossible work hours. I have to somewhat gloatingly add that all of them ended up in hospitals and subsequently became very strong advocates of low-to-medium working hours. So IMO the "punch the sun!" people don't live a sustainable work life.
I suspect what happens in software is as you go from 40 to 50 hours there is a modest bump, which plateaus as people fatigue. They ratchet effort downward to handle being on deck for 50 instead of 40 hours. Reading Reddit and watching the proverbial GIFs.
Now in this situation one can try to get that bump again by going to 60 instead of 50. Or one can reduce hours from 50 to 40 and suffer (in the short term) a negative bump with the idea that it will bounce back. Given that the short term bump is immediate, and the readjustment takes some time to make itself shown; and given that short term results dominate ones thinking, we can see how one will continue to choose longer and longer hours.
Maybe you could ask a more specific question? Since this question is so general, I fear I will more or less repeat myself and we will find ourselves in the same situation.
Well, I was wondering if your previous comment actually defended a position or not. I was unable to decipher if you claim a number of optimal work hours for yourself -- or in general.
I definitely accomplish less overall when I work longer hours. For a week, I'll do more work. The next week I'll probably browse more Reddit. I just eventually rebel and don't want to do so much work anymore.
Depends on how interesting the work is and how motivated I am. I think on average 20 hours of progamming a week + a few hours here and there for email and random things are optimal.
There's already plenty of evidence that working beyond 40 hours a week translates into a reduction in productivity. This is not some new, revolutionary insight; it's old news yet so many people and organizations ignore it at the cost of efficiency. The 40 hour work week is not just for your sake, but it's in the company's interests as well. I could be wrong but a lot of the data from was from WWII. When your country's survival is on the line, most civilians will be very motivated to work as much as possible producing municitions and war machines. Some researchers measured productivity vs work hours during this time and they found a certain point where productivity just plummets.
Unfortunately these are the only links I can find given 2 min and I don't believe that they cite WWII research:
(What I like about Dustin's post is that he mentions that you can have a boost in productivity if you work longer hours temporarily like say for two weeks. Beyond that, there's no gain in productivity and most often there's actually a net loss)
I would dangerously extrapolate that it's not just productivity that suffers, but also correctness. Anecdotally I made more mistakes and was off mark the longer I extended myself.
Of course I don't believe these countries demise is caused by longer working hours. I know Italy a bit more than Greece and the main problem there is decades of widespread corruption at all levels of society.
But in some way it's a small reflection of an inefficient society.
Of course. Oriental cultures place immense value on the concept of "face", that is, appearing adept, productive, and excellent in all things [0]. In the U.S., sometimes we think "it'd be a good idea to try to save face here" just as a sidenote, really. In Japan and China, "face" is a recognized thing with its own formalities and children are taught to avoid losing face even at significant personal cost. In such cultures, you can see how one guy pulling a bunch of overtime quickly escalates into forcing everyone else to do so too. This escalation is assumed so readily that this is just considered a given of the culture, as we read about in this thread.
Likewise, Caucasian cultures place immense value on signaling status by bloviating about things you barely know about on the Internets.
Somewhat less sarcastically, if you're going to attempt to apply "Oriental" concepts here, I'd go with wa here: there is a set order here and it's not the junior's role to disturb it.
Yeah, it is indeed true that I barely know anything about this. I thought about adding a disclaimer but it's trite to read those all over the place IMO. I just think it's an interesting cultural difference, from what little I know. ;) More than happy to accept correction and education from people who are better informed -- getting pushback on my thoughts is one of the big reasons I like to post on HN.
China has a concept of face (面子 mianzi), but this concept is quite absent in Japanese culture, despite both of them being 'Oriental', and what you described right now will be quite baffling to a Japanese mind.
Sure, Japan has a strong concept of avoiding causing trouble to others, and of respecting your superior by waiting for them to leave, but that's not the main cause for overtime.
All this surveys give more or less the same picture: the number one reason stated for working long hours is "Too much work to complete in normal working hours". "This type of job requires overtime by definition" and "I want to do my work properly" come second.
Unlike Western tech companies, deadlines only come in the middle, and "Not wanting to leave earlier than my peers or my superior" comes dead last.
Thanks for the clarification. This doesn't apply in Japan at all? I admit I am mostly porting over what I know about the Chinese concept, and based on a few anecdotal conversations with people I know who've spent significant time in Japan, assuming this was a piece of cultural heritage they shared. Since this is an embarrassing mistake to make if no such concept exists, I appreciate the correction.
I "worked" 40-hour weeks at an insurance company with tons of process, paperwork, reliance on other teams with constrained resources, etc. for 4 months and accomplished nothing.
When I arrived the bug software had 40 open bugs. When I ended my contract, the bug software had 4 open bugs and 36 bugs awaiting QA resources to be assigned. I'm not exaggerating.
I've seen companies with departments that work 40 hour weeks, and accomplish pretty much nothing at all. For various reasons.
South Korea went even crazier and stole their consumer electronics business.
(Both in terms of government subsidies and extreme working hours. And: contrary to the opinion of the united socialist workers of HN, extreme hours sometimes are sometimes actually needed in order to build something new, desirable - well before anyone else. The fact that "extreme hours" are also employed when that is not really the target does not really change things.)
I'm not from the US and I'm definitely not socialist (had enough of that, thank you very much), but extreme hours has a specific role: crunch time. If you're in crunch time all the time, regardless of your field of work, something went terribly wrong somewhere.
Sure. And a crunch time can last 6-12 months and be effective. There are many examples of that in product development history. I can't imagine that doing it for longer than that would work though.
Output = Total Factor Productivity * Function of (Capital, Labor)
===
Think of TFP as all the environmental variables that make up "technological dynamism" or the economy's technological infrastructure (horse -> steam -> coal -> oil, human capital/education, etc.) that increase productivity in fundamental but intangible ways, and that can only be calculated indirectly.
If you hold TFP (z) and Capital (K) constant, an increase in Labor (L) (total number of hours worked) should increase output.
If investment in capital is decreasing (which it currently is) and subsequently the stock of capital decreases; or, if the TFP is decreasing (which is currently is), an increased amount of labor is required to keep output constant.
Weak/declining output = slow/negative GDP growth = "bad economy"
The "Cobb-Douglas" output model takes this simple model one step further by embedding the output elasticities of labor and capital into the production function, allowing one to build in diminishing marginal returns. I.E. every hour of labor or unit of capital above a certain point produces less output than the previous hour/unit. [1]
Hours worked doesn't differentiate between the time I spend pressing the button on the widget machine and the time I spend hitting the widget machine with a baseball bat. It's not really a measure of work.
In it, you see how all the lights automatically turn off at 10 PM. You can judge how many offices still have workers in them by the lights being turned back on.
Kind of sad people think they have to work past 10 PM, just to bump up their company image and bosses bonuses. This is what slave labour looks like in the 21 century.
How does this reconcile with the difficulty of firing people? I've heard they have rooms where people just come in and watch tv all day because a company doesn't want to fire them.
Lack of career mobility has been cited nunerous times of why their is this problem exists to begin with.
It is very difficult if not impossible to move one company to other mid-career, especially past certain age (job listing in Japan may can list upper age limit), as Japanese hires are very focus on graduates on given year.
One reason is because it is not easy to fire people, one wouldn't find opportinities elsewhere, so they are often forced to put up with their situations without much controls.
People who get sent to those "do nothing" room (they call it many ways to sounds politically correct, things like "career development department") are those company wishes to fire. There are scandals on these time to time, but instead of letting them watch TV all day it usually consists of meaningless tasks or simply forbidding to do anything to force them quit voluntary, but these are certainly newsworthy extremes.
I will omit reasons for long hours as these are discussed elsewhere in other threads.
That's sad, especially since most of the extra hours are busywork and peer pressure from what I've read.
What happens in Japan if you put in a simple 40-hour week, do good work, and then leave at the end of the day? I also understand their government makes it very difficult to fire employees. And I can't imagine they'd reassign you to watch the paint dry if you're actually doing good work. Would you mainly miss out on promotions?
Is it just a social thing, or is it economic? Since it's harder to fire people in Japan, there's a lot of risk to hiring a new employee. So maybe the culture helps weed out uncommitted people, which helps derisk hires? Or, to a certain extent, lets you get more productive hours out of them.
I live and work in Japan since 2011. The most part of this time in larger companies. Afaik Dentsu takes or took huge pride in being an elitist salaryman operation. People joining them couldn't be totally unaware of this. Keyence is another place with a similar reputation. Although you'll find more places like this, it is not that common. I am pretty sure every country has companies like this.
Further, Japanese people work long hours. Some will due to peer pressure. Some will cause they have nobody waiting at home. In some workplaces your colleagues are like friends. So, they socialize a lot during work hours. I think there is no single reason why Japanese people work longer hours than Europeans for example.
I am convinced however, that on the average a Japanese employee takes a huge amount of pride from doing a good job. The point: How to judge if a job was executed well or not? I experience this not to be so easy mostly due to the Japanese style of communication, which leaves a lot of space for ambiguity. Maybe long work hours stem from this.
The little I know about Japan is from Anime, books, articles and online comments.
In Japan, leaving before the boss is distasteful. Also, going home early instead of socializing after work is frowned upon even by one's spouse.
I've also read that there's no job hopping. Employee for life is still a thing there. And an ex-employer's comment is heavily weighted by prospective employers.
Additionally, loyalty is highly valued, probably more than ability.
> In Japan, leaving before the boss is distasteful
My personal management policy is I get in before and leave after all my employees incase they need me and to show them that I am there for/with them (within reason - if someone is putting a really late night I may leave first).
The idea of not leaving before the boss leaves is weird to me. I get higher pay and more stock options, why should I be leaving early when my team is working their butt's off?
Edit: I realize this could be taken as a ploy from me to get the team to work more hours. But I also don't shame employees for leaving before me. It's not a contest. If they get their work done they shouldn't feel guilty leaving at 5:00.
> If they get their work done they shouldn't feel guilty leaving at 5:00.
Close but not perfect. My correction would be "even if they don't get their work done, they shouldn't feel guilty leaving at 5:00."
The reason I say this is because one could easily argue that there's always more work to be done. That's always been the case for me anyway. But tomorrow is another day. When you've put in a full workday already, nobody should make you feel guilty for leaving just because there's more work to do. There's always more work to do!
I'm sure that's what the parent meant - I understood "get their work done" to mean "they are working productively over a long period" and not "they finished all assigned tasks for the day"
Problem of Japanese employment is that employment often do not carry clear "job description" or it may be taken so lightly. So regardless of whether you are done with your work for the day, your boss may approach and say "hey, your fellow co-worker is still not done with their tasks, why aren't you helping them before you leave?"
> The idea of not leaving before the boss leaves is weird to me. I get higher pay and more stock options, why should I be leaving early when my team is working their butt's off?
For two reasons:
- You get higher higher pay because hopefully you are more useful to your company than the other people in your team.
- You are probably forcing your team to work longer than they would if you left before them.
As I pointed out in another post. The average number of hours worked is barely more than 40 so I don't think people feel pressured. And related to that, we encourage people to use their vacation time.
Yeah, you can always do some of tomorrow's goals, and continue until you hit some more difficult problem, at which point your work in advance will let you spend more time working on that problem.
People who don't like what they do won't do this, of course.
Serious answer... if they really have nothing else to work on then sure. But that's obviously rare. So more realistically... if the project was early I'd actually suggest to them that if they want to take some PTO time they can.
No, but as I pointed out in another post. The average number of hours worked is barely more than 40 so I think people get it.
As far as "out at five" goes... we have flex hours so some people don't even get in until 10:30... if they left at 5 it would be a very short week for them.
At the company I work for, managers are encouraged to keep normal hours so as not to set a bad example for employees. Your reports may take a different message from your long work hours than you intend. "This is what it required to make it to the next level." "He's judging me when I leave." Just something to consider the next time you evaluate this decision.
While I understand that is a real risk (which is why I added my edit)... the average time someone in our company works is 45 hours with most being closer to 40 so I don't think it is having that effect.
More precisely, some people come in late (10:30 or so) and some people come in early (7AM or so)... I come in before the 7 AM people and leave after the people who came in at 10:30. But none of them work excessively. (except for me)
I gather that Japan has an ageing population and therefore issues with underemployment among older people. Spreading out the work among more people seems logical.
In some ways, I admire the French approach to work/life balance.
No wonder Japan's birth rate is falling. Who in their sane mind would want their children's to have a difficult life. High time for Universal Basic Income.
This is an interesting difference compared to Denstu Aegis (which I worked for) which has been pushing from the top a lot of "Work-Life balance" principles.
Over one whole month, so that's more like 61 hours per week. Which, judging by the rest of the comments in this thread, isn't unexpected for a Japanese white collar worker.
Hell, I spent the month of December on a "karoshi" project with types of hours. Fuck that! I took two week off to recover. At least they paid me overtime for the hours between 45 and 60, which is highly unusual.
"Traditionally, salarymen (and they are, by the way, mostly men) are hired into a particular company late in university and stay at that company or its affiliates until they retire."
"The employee hereby promises the company: Your first obligation, in all things, will be to your company. You will work incredibly hard (90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment) on their behalf."
"Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake rather than because it actually accomplishes more productive work. Depending on one’s company, this overtime may be compensated or “service overtime” — “service” in Japanese means “thrown in for free in the hopes of gaining one’s further custom”, so your favorite restaurant might throw in a “service” desert once in a while or you might do 8 hours of “service” overtime six nights a week for 15 years."
The whole post is a great read that comes from a first-hand experience.