>Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake
That's just stupid. It makes me wonder, though: is the work culture similar for ex-patriots working in Japan?
That's just stupid. It makes me wonder, though: is the work culture similar for ex-patriots working in Japan?
> 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 those late nights spent with a room full of people online shopping or on HN.
Works great for manual labor.
Source: woke in construction
I can code 80 hour weeks for a bit. Put out a ton of code. Can't do it for a month straight. But I could do manual labor overtime for a month straight.
Factory sent from 2 8 hour shifts to 2 10 hour shifts. They got quite a bit more production without the full cost of adding a third shift.
As a programmer I'm not sure extra pay would help. My brain can only code so many hours.
I definitely saw salarymen on trains falling asleep or all heading out in packs to bars though, so I have no doubts about there being a very hard-working middle-class that also has extra-office obligations.
On the other hand, most of my peers consistently stayed up through the night during examinations. Most of my peers studied in groups. I sat in on a few sessions and discovered that for every hour of study, an hour was spent on petty discussions. I stopped attending them since.
I'm now doing a PhD, so that may all change. I did fine during my first semester, so we'll just have to see.
I was surrounded by people who, like you said, regularly stayed up all night prior to exams. Sometimes we even scheduled that: the students would organize study-group sessions from 10PM-til.
I had a policy then that, no matter what, I was going to get a full night's sleep. Period. Full stop. I think it served me very well. A quick refresher in the morning gave me probably as much recency in terms of memory, and personally, my brain just works a lot, lot better with plenty of sleep. Even if I didn't know an answer, it was a lot easier to stay calm and rationalize something that often turned out to be right or good enough.
I only felt a little bad about it once - in a math class I left the study group right before my bedtime, while still getting the notes they'd put together the rest of the night. I felt a little uneasy about not pulling my weight, so to speak, but oh well. It could have been scheduled earlier and I would have gladly stayed.
So I'd keep it up.
Nowadays things are a little different for me - a lot of my job unfortunately involves being present regardless of whether there's anything to actually do. I worked two-and-a-half days straight a couple months ago. No overtime pay. :\
I'm exactly the same! Unfortunately, sleep is extremely underrated nowadays.
Someone on Quora asked Jimmy Wales (yes, it's a thing) what he regretted not doing enough during his youth. His answer was getting enough sleep. His argument was that, as you grow older and get more responsibilities, you'll get less and less sleep, so why not get the most rest while you can?
> Even if I didn't know an answer, it was a lot easier to stay calm and rationalize something that often turned out to be right or good enough.
That's a very valuable skill in my opinion, and I think it carries over well to stressful situations in general.
Learning and study, along with their career path, is different for everyone.
I had a similar experience. Even through my PhD at a top-tier school in applied math, I didn't do "all-nighters" or cram sessions. In fact, after my first 2 years of PhD (where I regularly put in 80 hours a week because of the course load), I toned it down to 40-50 hours. I also didn't use performance enhancing drugs meant to treat things like ADHD.
I did (and still do) use a lot of coffee in the mornings. I also recommend going out to bars to have those petty discussions, so that socializing is reliably separated study.
If you were a cs student in 1995, you pretty much had to work in one of the basement labs. One of the profs liked to come to the lab at 3am before a deadline and laugh at us.
The social aspects of the old labs made for many memories and lessons.
Also we didn't really have many people with laptops, so if you had a group project meeting in the lab was pretty much the only way you could all get computers but still interact with each other.
If you ever find yourself working in Japan, use your foreignness to an advantage!
Too bad I don't have perks of using foreignness there...
[0]: https://hideki.hclippr.com/2011/06/02/social-expectations-in...
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 :-)
I'm at my 3rd company in Japan now and while some of my previous experiences were bad, it was really more the fault of the company with things you could easily find in other countries as well and not "because Japan".
Expatriates.
To be clear this is not just a company issue it's a cultural issue. If the company does not have a policy of "go home at 6pm" the default culture everyone expects is "work late", especially for men.