In Japan, It’s a Riveting TV Plot: Can a Worker Go Home on Time?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Agggh hits to home. Arrogant American me rolled into a Taiwanese job expecting to skyrocket up the ladder on results alone. Nope, because I left at 5 sharp to enjoy the beautiful mountains, I was a lazy shit. Never mind my 10x increase in sales. Well, also I was an arrogant prick.
I chew on this issue a lot - it's bad to work so much. But, it's culturally ingrained. Some people are trying to change it... but it's happening so slowly. We have our own culturally ingrained things in America that I'd like to change as well, and that are changing, but so slowly. How do you implement change?
I guess that's the plot of any good fantasy or political drama, how do leaders convince people that change can be good?
Showing the idea to a broad audience on tv is actually one way to do this.
(although there are ways this can backfire)
"In the novel, the decision to work overtime leads to her downfall: She becomes addicted to work, ends up in the hospital and loses a new beau, who has a decidedly more relaxed attitude toward his own job. But on the TV show, which began airing in April, Ms. Higashiyama is destined for a happier fate, said the producers"
They're subverting the novel and using it as a tool to support the obsession with putting in more hours, not avoid it, apparently.
But I will tell you an actual and more direct example. The recently elected president of Ukraine LITERALLY is a comedian who was the star of a show where he plays the President of Ukraine! He had very little in the way of policies, but a lot of sharp humor, criticism of Poroshenko and the fact that many people routinely could see him on TV being the “President”!
It was one of the first, if not the first, portrayal of a black woman on television in a non-stereotypical, non-subservient role, even if it was just secretarial duty on a spaceship.
[0]https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942461/Star-Treks-Uhura-Re...
Someone big and local has to step in, let the the workers leave on time yet kick everyone’s butt on the market. Then everyone will start copying the practices.
What's described here is how most art movements and industrial revolutions where born.
Right around 6PM at my apartment, the downstairs tenants light up with the most awful, stanky skunk-weed. You literally cannot keep the windows open; and yet, in the middle of summer and no central AC, you can't afford to be there with them closed, either. So, in effect, my neighbour forces me to ensure I'm not home at that hour.
Anyone you could bribe to do the same near your office? :P
Jokes aside, I don't believe any amount of laws/hacks can completely fix the issue, they sure can help. The attitude has to change. There is more to life than work, money, titles, corner office etc.
The saddest part in all of this is a large part of the workforce has nothing to show for all those long hours they put into work. It might be a tiny bit comforting, if they at least got something in return for their hard work. They've been brainwashed into thinking "at least I have a job" :(
I never understood why "just results aren't enough" for working in some cultures.
If sales grow 10x under your watch, was that because of your hard work and talent, or because the economy went through an upswing and a few lucrative customers stumbled in the door on their own accord?
If your colleagues responsible for the neighbouring regions aren't doing as well, would you have done any better in their place?
Very hard to know. But they can easily see if you're working overtime.
Its on American company /career culture changing from staying with one big company your whole career to multiple and smaller ones.
[0] www.paulgraham.com/re.html
I don't know of a better term to use, but "overtime" is certainly a tricky one to use here.
In many places I worked in the US, it is somewhat of a badge of honor to spend long hours at work (how many of those are actually productive, is a different story). And these aren't even startups.
This can't continue - an entire generation of people have been brainwashed that hard work = good, costs be damned. It has to change.
IMHO, the only reasons to work long hours are - real emergencies (like the kind doctors and cops deal with, not the kind when some photo sharing app goes down for 15 mins), or you're working on your own business. It is ridiculous to work 70 hours a week bringing someone else's dreams to life, especially while getting paid for only 40 out of that 70. This is even more annoying when the said job adds no value or negative value to society.
One being that lack of quality sleep from working such long hours which can negatively impact sleep and has massive economic costs due to workspace accidents, errors and poor judgement.
From memory, one statistic showed Japan was losing the most money by far.
I highly recommend the book for those interested in improving your life.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1791.html (PDF link near bottom)
It doesn't continue, I have never accepted that or let it get to me. Why do you?
Personally, I'm pessimistic that any metric about productivity can be useful in the long term, but I recognize that in this reality, there WILL be metrics used to judge you. So, what's the best way to handle this? Is there anything an individual contributor can do to guide towards better metrics, or even just the perception of such?
Even that doesn't make tech look great. Hours are bad for most doctors, but it seems like emergency medicine handles it a lot better. Doing some brief reading it looks like doctors can work 40 hours a week or under in the ER if they want to, and this is shift work.
The poll here tops out at 45hrs/week https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/how-many-hours-are-...
When he emerged two hours later, clinging to his IV pole, we were grateful for the manpower.
That's not counting all of our "unofficial hours". You officially work, whatever, 9-6. You're packed with patients for those hours, though, with almost no time to chart, so you go home and chart ... and on a daily basis at home, you're catching texts from colleagues for informal consults and requests to see patients the next day. Your "off" hours aren't off - and if you have to take call, and end up driving back to the hospital...
EM "handles it better" (a phrase I'm loathe to use) because they have legit shift work, with no continuity. No one calls them for a consult; they're not responsible for anyone after they leave because all their patients are short-stay, they don't have to see "every patient on X roster," they just have to manage their ER while they're in it. They manage shifts because of features more-or-less specific to their specialty. A handful of other specialties share those features, and manage to do the same. But not most.
Hell, I chose to pursue my specialty specifically because it lacks emergencies. I never wanted to wake up in the middle of the night post-residency; no one pays you enough for those hours (you're generally not paid for those hours.)
I just think that tech, especially startups, don't handle overtime well. A service might not need to have high availability, and if it does there a ways to manage operations well. Leadership focusing on quality, so that production issues are minimized is good. Explicit on-call schedules can provide benefits if it's not a ton of work, being on-call is definitely a negative. But knowing that you don't need to be available at all is better than not having an on-call schedule. Shift work, with the focus on explicitly dividing up the schedule between employees can provide that benefit.
I haven't worked at Google, but the Google SRE book mentions a lot of things I like. Like giving the option for cash compensation for overtime, requiring postmortems for on-call incidents, capping the percentage of ops work, and having multi-site teams to minimize night shifts all sound like great ideas.
I think there are a lot of situations where service reliability could be improved while making things easier on sysadmins and developers.
course, that would probably result in lower wages for those shift
(that being said, in my country, doctors working hours in the likes of hospitals are notoriously unsafe/long/unreasonable/unethical as well, so your mileage may vary)
In both the places I've worked, it's a common joke anyone says when somebody leaves. everybody laughs and nobody gets offended. It doesn't mean anything.
It's like if you're on the bus and someone's sitting really close. Some people would say "Excuse me, you're too close", but others would jokingly say "Little close, aren't you?", but the meaning is the same - Move.
That kind of thing only works as a joke when it's about an obviously late hour (i.e. well past the norms of the company). If someone stays until 9pm to put out some fire and then people joke about working a half day, its obvious that there's no underlying meaning to that, since the leaving hour is well past the established norms
I would say this applies to any value.
Also, I'd probably worry that such frequent jokes walk a very fine line towards passive aggressive behavior (again, such jokes just won't exist where there is no expectation).
obviously I don't know your workplace, so there's a good possibility no one gets offended, but just pointing out there's different interpretations of such actions, and just because no one's saying anything doesn't mean it's not happening...
(
One of my jobs in Germany had a strict 35 hour week. No overtime allowed unless paid 2x and even that was very difficult to do. Management was definitely much more decisive and we worked most of the 35 hours. With my current employer I am pretty sure I am working less productive hours but I am in the office more. Meetings, meetings, conference calls, more meetings and no clear decisions.
Unless you're hourly.
Saw this in Oil and Gas industry among Engineers and Designers (the pipeline/wiring kind, not the UX kind), not sure if it's true for other industries though. Haven't worked contract in software yet to see for myself.
Until of course the brown envelopes came out then as he said even the tea boy got a grand - this is mid 70's btw.
I'm starting to see it as a loss, the additional time I may put in as overtime is subtracted from time I have for side projects and learning that is far more important to my career (as well as metal / physical health).
The government may not have standing to sue on the worker's behalf.
The agency that prosecutes tax fraud may be larger and better funded than the agency that protects workers.
One tax evasion charge may combine the cases of thousands of affected workers into one case, where the individual cases are too small and time consuming to pursue.
The penalties for tax evasion may be more severe than the penalties for wage theft.
which step don't you agree with?
2) Unpaid overtime is not really unpaid unless your employment agreement explicitly states that you are not supposed to work more than 40 hours. If you get paid $100k to work 50 hours, then you are getting paid $100k to work 50 hours, not $100k to work the first 40 and $0 to work the next 10. Your comp is payment all the hours you work, not just the first 40.
Of course there are exceptions, such as programmers.
> The conditions are that her contract term is for 3 months only, working time is from 9am to 6pm on weekdays only and no extra work or work expected on holidays.
Contrary to all the Western BS about "samurai caste" etc. (it's always some dim-witted "academically proven" stereotype with you folk), the Samurai completely lost their power during the Tokugawa period due to inflation.
Meiji broke this completely, and gave power to an oligarchy consisting of rich merchants/farmers (and some their samurai co-conspirators who helped with the restoring Meiji to power.). In fact, this transition was helped by the British, which might explain why Meiji was so anti-Asia to begin with - there was an incomplete purge of Buddhism and conscious playdown of Chinese culture.
B. Sure, the samurai lost their political power by the Meji period. That doesn't mean their social and cultural influence disappeared overnight, especially since the country spent decades more or less under the thumb of the Imperial Japanese Army....who saw themselves as carrying on the samurai legacy, well within living memory for some Japanese. In the 30's and 40's it permeated the school system, so generations of Japanese grew up with that same military discipline, inherited from the IJA, who inherited it from the samurai.
They sure as hell didn't get rigid selflessness and tolerance for suffering from rich merchants. Plus they still form up for morning PT sessions at corporate jobs! They just have the intensity dialed down to.....1/10. Do you ever see this in any culture that hasn't had a strong military tradition?
Couldn't find a decent video of Marines doing company-level PT for comparison, but here's Army Basic Training at "Relaxin' Jackson" (everyone pokes fun at graduates of this base for producing the softest Soldiers): https://youtu.be/cIVWU8hyuI0
There may also be other factors, but I think this is one.
Also there is a lot of weight placed on seniority, so younger people have pressure to work harder to make up for what they lack in experience. While a little less common now, it used to be understood that you shouldn't leave work before your boss.
I suspect sometimes it's just a matter of a few large employers setting people's idea of what "normal" is.
All the OLs there immediately recognized her and showed her more respect than a what a typical Japanese celebrity would receive in similar situation. My guess was that the actress was older, and was known for her strong personality and work ethic, and the OLs respected her for it.
Anyway they started sharing their war stories and asked the actress for suggestions. It's quite an enlightening experience for me as I wasn't very familiar with Japanese OL culture. Some of the stories were startling.
I might have missed it, for anyone else looking for it: https://www.tbs.co.jp/watatei/
It was as good as it could get I think. No stone were left unturned, they didn’t shy out from most themes (sexual harassment, moral harassment, generation gap, sub contracting, bribes, actual death by overwork, heroism etc).
The take on the subjects is honest and decent, they manage to push well thought arguments without making too much ennemies or pushing the ball too far. The ending is a very soft landing without ruffling too many feathers.
I hope some other series will fill the gap left open and have a more aggressive take, but this series was good enough I think.
I would compare it to Haken no Hinkaku, in a more modern and less cliche company setting.
Cleveland as Japanese: " I am going to work 12 hours overtime, on top of the 10 hour daily work so that i can bring honor to my family"
Laughed really hard wondering who works like that, but guess the joke is on me :(
I realize that the change from a manufacturing-oriented economy to a knowledge-work-oriented economy is going to take decades, and there are going to be a lot of bumps along the way and likely a good bit of bloodshed, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant to watch.
The US game industry - except you don't get overtime pay (maybe pizza).
Out of curiosity, what would you like to change in the US?
Those aren’t culturally ingrained in the US on any wide scale. It’s not the expectation to be racist to move up in the corporate ladder in the US. We’re talking about common culture across the majority of the group.
Not even American exceptionalism is common in workplaces (e.g. see every big tech company). About the only thing that is common is that people think the country is fucked up because of “the other political party”.
It was an array and you started making a dict, assuming whatever connections you wanted.
See Americans are trained to not be so gaudy but quietly believe in these things. I see it all the time when I actually push people to share their political views. Democrats and liberal minded folks totally ok with bombing the Middle East and making life cheaper and easier for America.
So I guess it’s something of a ymmv, depending on whether you actively dig or just idly observe.
I think what the internet has shown is we all have wildly varying ideas of what being free means at an individual scale but at a macro social like scale pretty much just follow the corporate drum beat.
IMO that’s the concrete way to begin to normalize away from the bulk of the things you describe.
When we show the aristocracy we can peacefully organize around our own interests, that will have them properly concerned.
If my house is burning down it's not made acceptable by my neighbor's house also burning down.
If, for some reason, you thought that—to use a random example from the list—people having names was a bad thing, would you try to use politics to get people to stop naming their children? No; that'd be insane. People aren't going to give up doing that as long as they're still human beings in any sense we recognize. Even if you outlaw it, they'll still do it; it'll just be a secret.
Same goes for many good things, but also for many bad things. You'll never be able to erase the human concept of e.g. people having things that are more "theirs" than someone else's (even in a communist totalitarian regime) or sexual jealousy (even if there's a central educational authority raising everyone polyamorous), or arbitrary etiquette fads (even in the context of a concrete replacement for them, like a military code of conduct) or people valuing kin over strangers (even if Effective Altruism propaganda were to be broadcast from loudspeakers on every corner.) You can't make a world without these things in them, without making a world without humans as we know them in them.
There are problems amenable to politics. Maybe most problems. But some problems just... aren't. (These problematic aspects of humanity may be amenable to other solutions—potentially many! It's just that a political solution requires the majority of people to want it; and, by the fact that these are universals, the majority of humans will never want them gone.)
Which is, again, why I think zanny was being downvoted: wishing people could get over wanting to work overtime, and wishing human brains would stop categorizing things and then assigning the categories themselves moral worth, are very different kinds of wish, that don't really feel like they should be in the same kind of list. The latter kind of thing can't be described with "a problem with American culture", because that's not the level it exists at.
Over working is not healthy and you are not productive anyway. Work (at most) the 37.5hrs/week (maybe 40 if there's a crunch) you are paid for and take your 6 weeks of yearly vacation that you are entitled to (plus holidays) - is what I'd recommend and what my manager pushes. I think that's a good thing.