Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan • Hacker News Board

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#111

Post by quicklime » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:13 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #103

cdavid wrote: post #97

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 positive effect for the economy, it is Japan. Japanese companies are generally extremely inefficient. Outside of a few powerhouses, partially thanks to a protected and large domestic market, Japanese labor practices are antiquated. There is a culture of overwork that…

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?…

> 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!

I used to work at Toyota, although it might have changed since I was there (I doubt it changed significantly, though).

The factories and supply chain seemed well optimized. This is a huge cost in producing cars, so it makes sense to focus on this even over engineering productivity, to some extent.

But engineering certainly did involve lots of meetings, paper documents with hanko seals, and antiquated IT systems.

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#112

Post by alistairSH » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:19 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #88

alistairSH wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it. That's part of the reason we live AND work in the 'burbs (out near IAD, instead of inside 495). We were very purposeful about where we bought - balance of cost, location, etc. It's doable in most regions (SF/SV and NYC being notable exceptions). And it's why I asked. At least my mental picture of Japan has most people living in very small (by American standards) apartments. That might not be accurate, based…

2+ hours sounds like they want to live pretty far outside of the city. You can get a reasonably priced and sized place in Chiba and be in the heart of Tokyo in an hourish.

Yeah, it does. I got that from kubatyszko's response to my OP.

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#113

Post by QuesnayJr » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #52

C1sc0cat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sucks for the worker who now has to bear the cost of providing office space and internet connections and your local network. Also longer term a lot of housing stock will become les desirable and new residential housing will become bigger and more expensive. Oh and H&S inspections will now have to be included

For most people I suspect they come out on top even with the extra expense of needing a decent internet connection and some office space. Commuting (particularly into London, which is what I'm most familiar with) is expensive - I'm a 1.5 hour train ride out from London, and an annual season ticket costs £6,000-£7,000 per year, depending on the route and whether I want a travelcard for London as well.

That's amazing. The annual pass for all of Switzerland is only around £3,500.

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#114

Post by hibikir » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

cactus2093 wrote: post #42

alistairSH wrote: post #26

Can Japanese residents comment on how this works WRT office space in the home? Do people typically have space in their homes to have a proper home office setup? My wife and I are both WFH right now, and we had to buy a second desk and chair and repurpose what was previously our 2nd bedroom. The 3rd bedroom has always been a home office. If we lived in a downtown apartment, I'm not sure what we'd do, as we're both in…

I mean FWIW I’m American and your explanation sounds very foreign to me. I’m a millennial though, so owning a house at all is quite obstacle. Scrounging up a down payment when even a 2 bedroom apartment is $1-$1.5 million is not the easiest task. Renting an extra 2 bedrooms to have lying around in case we suddenly need 2 offices would also cost an extra couple thousand dollars a month. My wife and I are both working…

The US has very localized housing problems. Many tech giants are realizing that they have to either diversify their locations or enter into a housing spiral, as there just aren't enough houses for how many people they'd like to hire.

Once you step out of a small number of markets, the price problem goes away. I live in a well sized metro in the midwest, and I've worked, from here, for companies you've heard about. 4 bedrooms in my street, sitting on half an acre and a decent school district, are $250k. A 1 bedroom apartment would be under a thousand a month to rent, and that's a modern building with good appliances, a gym, a pool and gigabit internet. A single person in tech, right out of school, can easily save enough to get a mortgage in their first year working.

So yes, your situation is very real, but if there was less pressure to be in Seattle, NY or SF, the housing problems would melt.

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#115

Post by derefr » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #103

cdavid wrote: post #97

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 positive effect for the economy, it is Japan. Japanese companies are generally extremely inefficient. Outside of a few powerhouses, partially thanks to a protected and large domestic market, Japanese labor practices are antiquated. There is a culture of overwork that…

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?…

An assembly-line is a machine designed to avoid the need for synchronous human decision-making. Instead, there are only synchronous machine decisions, and asynchronous human decisions based on e.g. sampling, or spotting.

There are synchronous human tasks in some assembly-lines, but as long as they're rote tasks, inefficiency usually isn't introduced. Humans working as if they were machines, are rarely inefficient; and if they are, this inefficiency is "legible" for blue-collar work in a way that it isn't for white-collar work, so an inefficient human "part" can be, er, swapped out.

The whole "thing" that Toyota did to revolutionize car manufacturing, was essentially to make quality-assurance part of the same ground-level machine (i.e. make it a computed outcome of a series of "dumb" machine and worker steps), rather than making it a separate auditing process. As such, they essentially squeezed the ability to be inefficiency/incompetent out of the QA process.

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#116

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

jbay808 wrote: post #108

chrisseaton wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#117

Post by TuringNYC » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

azuriten wrote: post #31

zkid18 wrote: post #8

Wow, that huge for Japan I believe. I live at Kichijoji and it takes me 1 hour to get to work in Akasaka. I love my place and somehow get used to this routine, but honestly I wish I could rent a place in Japanese countryside.

If I could somehow guarantee a remote-work job for the foreesable future I'd love to move back and live somewhere more countryside but still with decent links to Tokyo such as the Shonan area or even somewhere a bit more east of Kichijoji like Hachioji or Ome.

I think this is the key thing. 75% of our family's problems would be solved if we could untangle ourselves from the burden of having to live in job-driven-metro areas close to the office. Mortgages would no longer be a problem, neither would school districts, neither would crushing commutes. Neither would childcare, since we'd have enough room in the house for help.

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#118

Post by caymanjim » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #73

caymanjim wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not out of reach unless you insist on living in a major metropolis. A young couple earning under $100k combined can afford a comfortable 3-bedroom home in all 50 states, just not in a large city. Mortgage rates are near all-time lows and the 20% "required downpayment" has been a myth since before you were born. You don't even need great credit to buy a home with a mortgage under $1500/mo all-in with taxes…

$100k? A quick google shows me that median household income in the US is closer to $60k. And that's the median, so half of households will be lower than that.

It was a somewhat-arbitrary line. $60k/yr is about $3k/mo takehome. While that's not a lot of money, it's enough to live a modest lifestyle including a mortgage and raising children with only a single parent working. I'm not saying it won't be a struggle, but it's doable. It's how I was raised and it's how most of my family lives, and I'm in NJ, which is in the top 10 most expensive states. My niece and nephew-in-law live comfortably on $70k with two kids, two cars, one earner, and just bought a house. Life is hard and that's ok.

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#119

Post by derefr » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

cdavid wrote: post #105

snarfy wrote: post #66

Any Japanese care to chime in on how WFH is accepted culturally? When I worked for a Japanese tech company I was surprised by how old school they were. Landlines, business cards, reams of paper, week long meetings about policies, and this was a software company. WFH was forbidden unless it was an emergency.

It traditionally isn't. Japanese middle management practices would often make office space look good. Especially in software, the culture is quite antiquated, because software is traditionally seen as a cost center, and most companies externalize all their IT. If I had to describe most offices in Japan, it would be an unglamorous version of Mad Men. The culture of the customer is always right also implies making cont…

> The culture of the customer is always right also implies making contortions to please them, including many on site meetings where you have to be there just as a sign of respect.

I've always wondered if there could be something like a badge you could put on your business, to signal that you're participating in a separate sub-economy where the customer isn't always right. There must be modern companies where both sides of the giving-face transaction are just going through the motions with neither side actually thinking that that's the way things should be. Can't both sides in a long-standing relationship just get together to agree to change the deal? Or, if they can't do it on their own, can't a third party help them?

Maybe there could be a Japanese charter-city with the goal of being a "mock Silicon Valley", i.e. where every business there knows that every other business else there is going to present itself with the attitude of a real SV startup where you "fire your bad customers" and so forth. So, when dealing with a company from there, everyone else would know that you don't have to give them any face, just like you don't need to give real Americans any face.

Re: Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan

#120

Post by ghaff » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

bpicolo wrote: post #29

tazjin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It largely correlated with things like tech literacy and being open to change Honestly, this is a very patronising view. I understand that a lot of people here are strong permanent WFH advocates, but it doesn't fit everyone. My home setup is pretty good and I'll still be first in line for getting back to the office for a variety of reasons - and there's many others like me. If you think that means I'm less "tech li…

I agree. I fundamentally don't enjoy working in my home. Making the best of it while I can, and my productivity is fine, but it's taxing. I worked for a year and a half remotely a few years prior to the pandemic, and decided I did not enjoy it. I don't think that makes me resistant to change - I just consider it a change for the worse.

It's totally reasonable that some people prefer a hard separation between home and work, as well as the social aspect of an office. Although, at many work places, I expect the latter is going to be much diminished for a very long time if not forever at many company offices as many employees shift to remote either entirely or for a significant portion of the time.