South Korean government to shut off computers to stop its employees working late

I was born and raised in South Korea, and I have multiple years' worth of work experience in my home country. While I do agree that this argument could most definitely go both ways, I do think that 67% of workers opting to stay longer goes on to show just how prevalent the concept of "face-timing" at work really is in my country, regardless of which profession you work in. I can personally attest to many nights - more than majority of my work days, in fact - where I've found myself and my teammates working (or pretending to, at least) late into the night, just because my manager gave no signs of leaving anytime soon.

Unlike here in the States, individualism is not a value that society values; rather, it's essentially frowned upon. Confucianism manifests itself in modern society by being extended into the workplace; the idea of "we're all in this together" is almost forced upon workers, even in situations where it's clearly more of an individual thing. When your manager is working up until 10PM, I don't think a lot of Koreans would find it easy to leave work at 7PM, even when the work that's been allocated to her/him has been done.

It's ultimately simple.

The government has a fiat printing press.

Microsoft does not.

If Microsoft loses $33 billion per year for ten years (equivalent to ~1/3 of sales), it will go bankrupt. In fact, if it loses money like that for just four years, it will likely go bankrupt.

If the US Government bleeds $1 trillion per year for ten years (equivalent to ~1/3 of its tax revenue), it will tax you more and or print away some of your standard of living. See: Japan's budget deficit versus tax revenue the last decade. Nothing stopped the Japanese Government from being fiscally wildly irresponsible, then debasing the Yen and stealing the standard of living of the Japanese people to pay for it all (still continuing now).

The need to not lose money perpetually, enforces at worst a minimum required level of efficiency by the vast majority of private businesses. There are very few exceptions to that, even in quasi protected monopoly situations such as railroads, telecom or airlines.

The US Government has no inherent efficiency enforcement mechanism. As witnessed by the public debt going from $5.6 trillion to $21 trillion in just 17 years or so.

If you want to talk about required efficiency, trying running a manufacturing business with a 6% profit margin, or Walmart with a 2.x% net income margin, or a liquor store or convenience store with a 5% profit margin. You'll instantly learn how brutal and unforgiving the private sphere tends to be versus the more typically spendthrift ways of government.

It's a misleading simplification. Profit motive (or "private sector") is not equal to efficiency. But it's a strong motivator for it. Not perfect though, and the further you are from getting outcompeted and dying, the more space you have for inefficiencies to creep in.

One of the big sources of inefficiency affects governments and companies the same - the difficulty of keeping an organization functioning grows superlinearly with the number of people in it. That's why in a small company, if your computer breaks, you can just borrow the company card and go to the nearest store to buy a new one, while in a large company, you'd be dealing with procurement and five layers of management approvals. A large company looks not quite unlike a government organization.

(Also worth mentioning that absolute efficiency is not a good thing either, when it comes to dealing with people.)

It's likely the complexity at fault. The government is much more complex than the average mid-sized company.

Yes, agree completely. Efficacy is the standard for government.

I assume you're familiar with that product?

Am I reading this correctly: You're running an agent on your various devices that sends data to their cloud? Application names at minimum, I assume. Website addresses as far as I can tell. If they harvest window titles: Probably file names you open.

Are you comfortable with that?

Interesting and verbose. I was thinking of starting with a google sheet though...

If I'm not careful, I work too much. An extra hour and a half every day quickly adds up.

I wrote a tiny Python script that adds an entry to an SQLite database, with aliases 'in' and 'out', which tells me how many hours I've worked each week.

It will make it easier to remember to leave at 15:30 today.