151–157 of 157 posts
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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.
Longer than what? What is the optimal number of hours?
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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.
I've worked there. It definitely did a lot of damage to my psyche. Even if you work for a foreign company, the way personal relationships work is very different from the states. That had taken me a decade to realize. I'm glad you didn't make the same mistake I did.
For what it worth, I work for a wholly owned subsidiary of Japanese company in the States and I'm doing very well :-)
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. So how can people feel a need to work 100hrs?
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.
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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 negati…
What's your point here?
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What's your point here?
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.
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> > 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…
I worked at a door factory. We worked 20% overtime for 6 months. We made 20% more doors. Works great for manual labor.
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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 cultu…
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. Excessive worktime (長時間労働) is a…