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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Played well, that sounds like a good way to get your side project off the ground. Then again, I imagine the cross section of under-performing employees that get this treatment and those that are ambitious enough to follow through on an idea for a side project/business is probably quite small.

Also, you probably would have to hide all the work, since depending on your contract your employer would probably have some claim to it, since it was during work hours.

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I would love to get 'put on the roof' like that, but I think the Japanese policy also states that you're not allowed to do anything outside of the ridiculously mundane task they assign you, and they actually watch you like a hawk to ensure as such. Pretty smart, most people aren't going to stay in that situation for long.

Could you imagine being the manager assigned to watch such employees? That's a special hell.

I once worked at a newspaper, when "online" was new and side project of the marketing department so that they could sell more ads.

Until I automated things, we were cutting and pasting a few articles each night from Quark into BBEdit and hand-massaging it into HTML templates for upload. They assigned us an "editor". Poor guy had written pro-civil-rights editorials at a time when that didn't go over well. Got assigned shit jobs for decades to try and force him out. We didn't create new content; there was nothing to edit. But, they made him go to all the meetings and report that each day. Dude used a giant trackball and knew nothing about tech, but somehow landed in the department that would one day rule the newsroom. I wonder how he's doing these days.

> Could you imagine being the manager assigned to watch such employees?

What do you think they do with the managers they want to fire? ;)

Why they don't fire the person? This is ridiculously sleazy.

It's a huge cultural taboo to fire anyone without cause in Japan. And even if you do have cause, there's a pretty high bar for what actually constitutes cause. It would be a huge scandal if a Japanese company, especially a large salaryman-style company, fired an employee for anything less than stabbing a coworker.

Hell, even in the entertainment industry, where employment is gig-based, Masashi Tashiro didn't get blackballed until he was convicted twice for voyeurism, twice for drug abuse, once for nearly crippling a guy in a car accident he caused, and once for posessing an illegal weapon [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masashi_Tashiro#Second_trial_f...

In these Japanese companies they'll be sorta monitoring you and fire you if you're caught not doing the mundane tasks they've assigned you. So they basically force you to quite or get fired.

If firing is an option, why wouldn't they do so in the first place?

Presumably it's the difference between firing with cause and firing without cause. There are many positions where performance is measured pretty ambiguously, so if you want to get rid of someone you couldn't demonstrate strong cause for doing so. Make them do pointless simple make-work, though, and you can easily find cause for firing if they don't do it.

Firing someone for performance isn't a thing in Japan.

The "pointless simple make-work" isn't to build up cause, it's to abuse and degrade them until they have enough of it and quit. The technical term for this is "constructive dismissal".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

Your explanation is missing a nuance in the comment I was replying to -- namely, that people were being fired for not doing the pointless simple make-work. If you're going to fire them for that, why not just fire them in the first place and skip that entirely.

Not familiar with the culture or mindset, but I'm guessing it's simply because "you're fired because you intentionally didn't do your work" is easier to accept mentally / emotionally then "you're fired because you're just kinda stupid and slow."

Yeah, that's in the same vein as to what I was trying to get at. Being fired because you refuse to do stupid make-work is certainly less psychologically damaging than being fired because you were no good at your real work.

And I think it goes both ways. The firee takes it less personally, the firer doesn't feel as rude.

Not sure if it's typically the case in Japanese custom, but there are a number of scenarios where a person forfeits certain compensation by quitting that they would otherwise be entitled to if they're fired. So if the company can get rid of them by making them think it was their idea, the company saves on severance / recoups equity, etc.

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