Comment by shoobiedoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shoobiedoo | Hacker News Reader

I don't know for sure, but after living in Japan for 5 years now, whenever something in a Japanese business feels antiquated, inefficient, or just plain backwards and wrong, it's usually because some manager in an office who has been there longer than everyone else decided that it's good enough.

It probably sounds like I'm exaggerating, but loyalty to the hierarchy goes deep here. I don't know how many times I've had to hold my tongue and not state a fact because if I did, the manager would "lose face". Not an insult, a criticism, or even an open question, just a fact-- if I know it's contrary to what a manager thinks is the right way, he gets to sit back and keep his ego puffed up for no good reason.

Once my manager asked me to aggregate a list in excel to find a final count for a range of parts used in our blueprints. I used a pivot table in Excel. It took me about two minutes. He snapped back, "How are you doing this so quickly? It must be wrong. Do it like this:" and he proceeded to take a screenshot of each page of the sheet, send the screenshots to chatGPT, and ask it to aggregate them. Dear god I wish I was joking. It took him over an hour and still left room open for human error (or AI error I guess). I showed him the pivot table method, he just scoffed and walked away.

I have heard from some native Japanese people that it’s all about efficiency—as in maintaining a comfortable level of inefficiency. Jobs at traditional companies in Japan are more of a lifestyle, and your co-workers are your family (sometimes moreso than your real family). The workday is slow and steady. Disrupting this dynamic by making everyone work harder or faster is frowned upon.

Not everyone likes this setup, especially the young, but many older Japanese prefer it, as it helps them maintain a comfortable lifestyle that they are used to, until eventual retirement. I won’t say either side is in the wrong here, it’s a cultural choice, but it’s probably not sustainable once the older generation retires.

No way to fact check this, but reminds me of the rude american as a service- position https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/arcj6w/the_loud_ame...

That reminded me of the memoir of William Buckley.

( https://archive.org/details/lifeandadventur00morggoog/ )

He was transported to Australia in the 19th century, but thanks to a shipwreck he ended up joining an Aboriginal tribe. He was taught their language and joined their society to a certain degree (they thought he was dead, so a limited degree).

He was horrified by the level of violence in their lives, and sometimes when two sides were lined up to do battle he would appear and go around knocking the weapons out of their hands, which prevented the battle.

I like to imagine faux-outraged tribesmen loudly lamenting "Oh no, the ghost took my weapons! Obviously we can't have a battle now. Oh well, nothing to be done."

I've worked in a similar asian country and that's one of the reasons I left. You cannot intellectually and professionally grow in this sort of environment.

I had a feeling that this was because of hierarchy but I wasn't sure. Now I know. Thanks for sharing.

It really depends on industry and size - notably, it's ironic but smallish-medium businesses are the most stuck in old practices. They don't have shareholders or the org structure to change things, while the largest companies, makers, ad agencies, etc have largely moved forward to more outcome focused process. The hierarchy definitely still slows things down, requiring a lot of paper approvals to actually do anything. But holding your tongue in a meeting is frowned upon at at least many large cap.

I am pretty sure the manager could have uploaded the entire excel into ChatGPT in its native format. ChatGPT would then open a “Work” window on the right hand side. The manager could then prompt it to do what he wanted. No screenshots needed.

screenshots inside an excel file (even of spreadsheets) are a preferred method of communication by many Japanese people in the workplace. You have to see it to believe it.

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