Correct me, but they want to cheapen the labor by adding more people do to the same job on a week timeline?
Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
381–390 of 518 posts
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#382Earlier 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…
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…
The West seems to target a "skeleton" staff for nearly everything these days. Management theory piles it as a best practice under "just in time delivery", but the reality is that there no longer is the distinction between fully staffed and skeleton.
I spent some time in Belgium a few years ago and was amazed to see that the two people on road projects who turn the "slow/stop" signs to control traffic on single-lanes were replaced with robots. So the EU has managed to figure out how to go under skeleton at least.
Meanwhile, when I was in Japan, there were indeed lots of seemingly "useless" people doing "useless" jobs on similar sized projects.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've forgotten the core tenet of every engineering discipline is the master-apprentice relationship. The reason why what you describe is really the gig economy is because you've turned contractors into autodidacts to cut costs. You're not only expecting engineers to work for you, you're expecting them to learn their craft without capitalizing that yourself. Someone has to pay for that too; it probably won't be your…
I really don’t understand this comment. At what point did I say or lead anyone to believe that we 1.) expect developers to be autodidacts? Because we don’t have meetings? Seems an odd way to measure engineering culture and 2.) this had anything to do with cutting cost? Our hourly wages are high enough to where the cost savings is negligible compared to fully loaded salaries. I’d be happy to share the numbers over ema…
You pay for employee training. You don’t pay for contractor training.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#384Earlier 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…
> 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 difference. Maybe the 20% extra people is the reason they always finish a lot faster.
Or the reason everything in Japan is so clean and actually efficient and reliable. You won't see the casual litter and degraded infrastructure that is commonplace in US and Western Europe - everything is kept in tip-top shape, because why not? When you have the wealth and workforce to spare, in practical terms it's just better to allocate capacity for this sort of tasks in quantities that might look sub-optimal on a spreadsheet.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Japanese government isn't saying "Let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!" Maybe, but if you've worked in Japan, or even just living here, you know about the long, pointless meetings, desk warming and busy work. Thus, it's highly possible the government is saying "let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work". Things are that top-down here that often companies won't do anything unless the govern…
> Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here Then what is?
I'm 4th generation Japanese-American, and in no way whatsoever qualified to answer your question, but I'll gladly do it nonetheless: they prioritize the collective over the individual.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, there’s a sort of Moneyball aspect here. Companies that can accurately pay out only for productive time instead of assuming all 40 hours of a work week are spent producing will make huge savings in payroll, increasing cost efficiency and making it feasible to hire larger cross functional teams. A software engineer probably only really works about 20 hours a week. That’s a 50% savings right there.
Why would any software engineer take an equivalent paying job that micromanages their every minute to make sure the company gets a full 40 hrs out of them, unless the pay were much better than what they'd get otherwise (eating in to that 50%) or they were desperate? This would be a huge mis-optimization IMO. Good luck attracting "top" workers and retaining them with this model. It's just "butts in seats" taken to an…
I mean what you’re basically saying is you want to work at inefficient companies that pay more than they actually need to.
If you’re not working, you shouldn’t be paid. Fair is fair.
Perhaps instead of paying per hour a company should offer pay per week, and it’s up to the developer to decide how many hours they will end up actually working that week and if the offered pay is worth it.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve heard recently (in a video that I don’t know how to find again) that that’s exactly what happened with the automotive industry’s chip shortage: Toyota was the only one that built a stock of chips in advance, and now are the only ones that can keep producing cars without being limited by the shortage. Edit: found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI&t=804s At 13 min. 24 seconds: > Just in time i…
I thought I'd rather watch the video than read your long transcript, I clicked it, it's Wendover with his weird speech pattern (some syllables loud, some syllables he runs through, but some vowels he drawls on...). > Just IN tiime, is such a SIMple principlee, but the purSUIT of the ELIMination of waste... Tab closed, thanks for the transcript.
Did the speaker on wendover change like 1~2 years ago? I feel like the voice used to be more, uh, geeky sounding.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#388It'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…
> I think the contract only + no meetings + no HR (no culture bullshit, no “get to know people” social events, no bullshit) company setup is going to be the future.
But in the US you see the opposite happening at a lot of large companies. I think what you described would be the future of a company with a homogeneous type of worker. However, we are humans we are not machines ignoring that we are humans can be detrimental. Not to mention worker equality is becoming important to be a stable work environment. It’s important to forget you have other roles and industries that simply cannot function the way you described (doctors, nurses, flight attendants, pilots, plumbers, etc.)
Also, I want I’m not saying the current technology corporate environment doesn’t need optimizing. It certainly does but it seems that we are moving towards that and trying to focus on what matter in HR as well.
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#389[dead]
Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split
#390I 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…
> The Japanese government isn't saying "Let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!" Maybe, but if you've worked in Japan, or even just living here, you know about the long, pointless meetings, desk warming and busy work. Thus, it's highly possible the government is saying "let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work". Things are that top-down here that often companies won't do anything unless the govern…
> Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here
... nor in the West, to be fair. Lies and cheats are commonplace in any Western workplace.
I think you are over-generalizing. Self-reliance is big in Japan too, even while egoism is not - it's drilled into people basically from birth, with things like students cleaning their own schools. Innocence is always politely expected until openly questioned, at which point it turns almost automatically into guilt; but it doesn't mean it's not "foundational" - in fact, it's much more entrenched, it's just that the act of questioning it carries so much more weight on all sides (an unfair accusation, if determined, would be extremely shameful) that nobody wants to go there until absolutely necessary.
They just play the game with a slightly different set of practical rules.