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Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

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Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#341

Post by kqr »

NGRhodes wrote: post #334
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet conspiracy theory is that Toyota's liberal knowledge sharing with competitors is really a psy-op to keep the competitors perpetually on the edge of ruin while they laugh all the way to the bank. They don't even have to be deceptive about it. Just in time is obviously about not having undue spare capacity, not about not having any spare capacity at all. But Toyota knows this nuance is going to be lost on buzzwo…

Toyota knows it competitive edge is its culture. Culture to change, to be retrospective, to improve. Lean, JIT, Kanban etc were derived from a culture of striving for perfection and to develop the optimal processes for a specific company is something that takes decades and is never ending, not something that can be read in a book, taught on a course in a short period of time.

There's also that story from back when Toyoda was making sewing machines or whatever it was, and a competitor stole copies of the engineering drawings for their latest model. Toyoda shrugged and said something to the effect of "So what? The really valuable knowledge are the mistakes we made coming up with those drawings, and that's not in the drawings. By the time our competitors have managed to get their copy of our machine to the market, we will have innovated away from that for our next model. And that innovation is informed not by what our current model looks like, but by the exploration we did to get there. None of that was stolen, so after this model, they will just keep repeating the mistakes we made."

I have no idea of whether this is true at all, but I really like the story anyway.

----

What I do know is true is that modern day Toyota doesn't mind sharing the solutions they have come up with to various problems, because they think the real value is in the people and processes to (a) identify the problems in the first place, and (b) come up with solutions suited to those specific problems.

Blindly applying Toyota's solutions to Toyota's problems to your organisation, just hoping that you have the same problems as Toyota and that their solutions will work also for you is a recipe for confusion, and not what matters. (Yet virtually every "development methodology" is a specific solution to a specific problem blindly applied to an organisation.)

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#342

Post by TheGigaChad »

ryanSrich wrote: post #137
paxys wrote: post #17

It's an open secret at least in the tech world that absolutely no one is putting in a productive 40 hours of work a week. This was true well before the pandemic and is more pronounced than ever now. Everyone needs to be "present" for 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but spends their time in pointless meetings, preparing documents and powerpoints that no one will read, faux social/teambuilding events, hour long lunches, g…

We did this at my new company. One 30 minute scheduled standup. That’s the only meeting we have all week. Of course people are free to jump on a video call to work through stuff, but scheduled meetings are generally discouraged, and to date we only have the one. Since everyone is contract, we’re seeing an average of about 26 hours per week. It’s by far the most productive team I’ve ever been on or have built. We ship…

Not everyone is an autist.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#343

Post by innocenat »

MarkSweep wrote: post #309
franciscop wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with your comment overall, but as someone who lives in Japan I'd like to point out that specifically "people who fill in the holes in roads" is a running joke in Japan since small street constructions always seem way over-staffed. It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little d…

Some notably low-staffed places in Japan are Yoshinoya and Sukiyaki (beef bowel fast food, often 24/7). It seems there usually just one person working there at a time.

You probably went during off time? It's usually more than 1 during busy time. (And it's Sukiya, not Sukiyaki)

And it's also probably not for wanting just 1 staff -- it's probably because no one want to work at those place.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#344

Post by dragonwriter »

onion2k wrote: post #213

I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone. In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers…

> In tech it’s very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don’t do productive work all the time they’re present.

While someone working a reduced schedule in an office where other people are working a full schedule may be able to set a schedule that misses some of the things they consider nonproductive (and may actually be more productive/hour for doing so), I don’t think that actually is likely to scale to the whole office switching schedules. If the people in authority that think that the meetings you feel are nonproductive are essential are still in the same positions of authority, they’ll still have the same meetings at least the same share of working hours, though there is a substantial risk that some of them will instead take the same number of hours per calendar week, regardless of the reduction in working hours.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#345

Post by alephnan »

ksec wrote: post #212
alephnan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when they can barely afford themselves decent standard of living Rent and food even in Tokyo is much cheaper than even medium sized cities in the states. People might not be able to afford a luxurious lifestyle in Japan, and economists standard of living models may tell you otherwise, but the standard of living for a typical person in Japan is high

Which is why I said ( Standard being different from person to person ). Once it becomes a norm, people want more.

You originally argued Japan has low birthrate because people can’t afford it.

There are macro and microeconomic reasons , but not being able to afford to raise a child is not one of them. Most of the reasons are social.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#346

Post by draw_down »

TrackerFF wrote: post #281
nkssy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it says a lot about Japanese workplace pay if a small business at 3-4 days per week can outperform it. Not that I doubt it in any way: I've just started my own sideline and I'm already at 25% of my job income yet only putting in 5 hours of effort to do so.

Yes, but for how long though. Many of these Japanese firms are many hundreds of years old, and will probably stick around for some hundred more years. Being able to run a small business for 5-10 years is very possible, but there's no guarantee you'll be able to do that for 20-30-40 years. We often hear about the success stories, when it comes to small businesses and startups, but there are unfortunately those that wi…

It doesn’t have to be the same small business across all those years, right? I don’t think anyone is saying these small businesses are trying to become hundred-year firms.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#347

Post by dragonelite »

kqr wrote: post #341
NGRhodes wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toyota knows it competitive edge is its culture. Culture to change, to be retrospective, to improve. Lean, JIT, Kanban etc were derived from a culture of striving for perfection and to develop the optimal processes for a specific company is something that takes decades and is never ending, not something that can be read in a book, taught on a course in a short period of time.

There's also that story from back when Toyoda was making sewing machines or whatever it was, and a competitor stole copies of the engineering drawings for their latest model. Toyoda shrugged and said something to the effect of "So what? The really valuable knowledge are the mistakes we made coming up with those drawings, and that's not in the drawings. By the time our competitors have managed to get their copy of our…

You see this a lot in IT companies if it works for google, Amazon and Microsoft, It will work for us while we have like a millionth their load or complexity.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#348

Post by greyman »

onion2k wrote: post #213

I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone. In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers…

What I find fascinating is why government should have such an authority to be able to mandate this.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#349

Post by tjpnz »

varjag wrote: post #339
kqr wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I think what passes for appropriately staffed in the West is actually understaffed. What's called optimal staffing in the West is just at capacity, which is a nice way of saying "with no spare capacity." Of course, with Japan being the land of just-in-time, one could argue that spare capacity is bad -- but that's an oversimplification. Necessary spare capacity is good. What's bad is not being able to addres…

No it's not just that. The minute we got off the plane in Tokyo we were met by a greeter pointing people to the escalator. Not that you could miss it, that was the only exit. In the city you could see people guarding potholes. Bus stations (not particularly busy) would have a couple men at each station that would help arrange the passenger luggage: something usually helped by the driver in the West. Once we took a ni…

Does it make sense from an economics standpoint? Perhaps not. But there are benefits to society as a whole. Quite often the people doing those sorts of jobs are getting on in life, if having that job means the person can stay active that could represent a few additional years where they won't be a burden on the health system.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#350

Post by arcturus17 »

ineedasername wrote: post #285
ajmadesc wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but why not just have literal slaves and not require that people have health insurance. The reductive "race to the bottom" can go both directions

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by this comment. I used a real world example of businesses with high customer-facing labor costs relative to their net profit margins. If you're getting into the everyone-deserves-a-living-wage side of things, that's a different conversation, one I tend to agree with, but is much more complex than the current discussion about whether current business could manage this if they opera…

Excellent retort, I didn’t read anything else from your original comment.

The amount of low-effort populistic comments on HN starts to be worrying.

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