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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

Any Japanese care to chime in on how WFH is accepted culturally? When I worked for a Japanese tech company I was surprised by how old school they were. Landlines, business cards, reams of paper, week long meetings about policies, and this was a software company. WFH was forbidden unless it was an emergency.

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It traditionally isn't. Japanese middle management practices would often make office space look good. Especially in software, the culture is quite antiquated, because software is traditionally seen as a cost center, and most companies externalize all their IT. If I had to describe most offices in Japan, it would be an unglamorous version of Mad Men.

The culture of the customer is always right also implies making contortions to please them, including many on site meetings where you have to be there just as a sign of respect. It is interesting the first time you do it, but gets boring fast.

I believe Japan has so much untapped potential, the generalization of WFH may be the catalyst for Japanese management practices to catch up the last 60 years.

> The culture of the customer is always right also implies making contortions to please them, including many on site meetings where you have to be there just as a sign of respect.

I've always wondered if there could be something like a badge you could put on your business, to signal that you're participating in a separate sub-economy where the customer isn't always right. There must be modern companies where both sides of the giving-face transaction are just going through the motions with neither side actually thinking that that's the way things should be. Can't both sides in a long-standing relationship just get together to agree to change the deal? Or, if they can't do it on their own, can't a third party help them?

Maybe there could be a Japanese charter-city with the goal of being a "mock Silicon Valley", i.e. where every business there knows that every other business else there is going to present itself with the attitude of a real SV startup where you "fire your bad customers" and so forth. So, when dealing with a company from there, everyone else would know that you don't have to give them any face, just like you don't need to give real Americans any face.

Perhaps one of the biggest barriers to fast moving SV style startups would be how difficult firing is in Japan. You need around 18 months to fire an ineffective employee. (And in contested cases I've heard of an employee who stayed on payroll for 4 years while the firing was finalised). It's one reason why people often face being harassed to the point of resignation rather than formally fired.

Indeed. It is particularly depressing to handle as a manager, because unless you have top notch HR, your only recourse to deal with somebody who does not perform is passive agressiveness, or at best plain ignorance. Imagine the effect on the morale for other people.

IIRC a few of the Japanese megacorps are known to just move underperformers to a do-nothing role where they at least can't cause harm. They hope they'll get tired of doing nothing and quit; but even if they don't, the company just moves on—treating their future salary as a write-off expense, and hiring someone else to fulfill their original role as if they had already left.

This actually isn’t a requirement unless you’re in the national pension system. When you’re below a certain number of employees you don’t have to join the national pension and many of those worker protections also don’t apply to you.

I'm wrapped in the software dev industry bubble and WFH is mostly doing well here. Some of my friends' workplaces are trying to do a half remote, half office situation where you come in to the office 2-3 days a week. Usually it's because they haven't got their communication flow done well and need to use those in-face times to do proper coordination.

I've been reading some Japanese discussions boards about remote and it's a mixed big. A lot of people enjoy remote and say it's their first time not having to do OT anymore because of the lack of (assumed) peer pressure. Some new managers are now discovering that they can contact their employees at any time of day now due to services like Slack. Not that they couldn't before, it's just more efficient now.

Either the general feeling is 'I've seen things now that I cannot unsee' and the expectation is things will change but no one is sure in which direction.

I live in Japan and at first everyone was against it, now everyone is for it and a whole new industry is cropping up. HP is early to the market with their solutions and Fujitsu must also be sensing the opportunity.

The reason the tides are changing is that there is a social consciousness aspect to it now whereas before it would've been viewed differently.

Add fax machines and it will be perfect picture of current situation in Germany.

Naturally. You can't do business in Japan without a fax machine.

Seriously!? I thought, Germany was unique with this fax machine thing.

A surprising amount of American personal business is still dependent on a fax machine. Especially in dealings with government, if you can't physically hand it in, it may need to be faxed. Always a terrifying feeling when you send a document containing all your personal identifying information to the fax nether, hopefully you dialed correctly.

One example from the US: Back in March, I was reading about people having trouble filing for unemployment because somehow faxes were deemed a secure communication method and they couldn't find a place to send a fax.

I recently had to get a copy of my car loan from chase in order to get new state license plates after moving. The 2 options for delivery were by mail or fax...

Yep... dealing with a large US bank right now and fax is the only way to do what I need to do. I made an inquiry at the IRS last year, fax was my only option for submitting some info they needed to fulfill my request. Fax is not dead in the US yet.

At a large Seattle-based technology company ~10 years ago, the only way to submit an expense report was via fax "for security", but there were no fax machines in the office, only multifunction printers that could send virtual faxes (not via a phone line)

When I legally changed my name in 2014, I had to fax my name change paperwork to a ton of different institutions. Fax or snail mail were the only methods they would accept.

How are two of the most advanced manufacturing countries so backwards?

This might be an over generalization, but the answer is in your question. Culturally, both places just don't respect digital as much as they love anything physical.

It is a pendulum swing: these countries advanced a lot after WW2, then they believed they found the ideal way and got stuck there. In the meanwhile time flows linear, other countries were left behind but caught up and moved on. This way Japan and Germany still work well due to their excellent history, not recent trends.

I would say more like they found a local maxima and stayed there, never going even slightly less efficient in order to find a higher maxima than the one they had.

Kind of reminds me of which countries have the fastest/cheapest Internet access now. The countries that had Internet first tend to have shitty copper infrastructure and expensive plans, while the newer countries are all up with the latest fibre infrastructure and fast/cheap plans.

I don't think there is a need to go slightly less efficient in order to improve the current processes; they just got frozen in time and there are many such examples with companies and countries. Remember Japan is not the first time doing it, at the end of the shoguns era they were behind the rest of the world they were more advanced than.

There is always a dip in productivity when switching systems as you need to untrain people from the old and train them in the new system. Then you need to work out all the bugs and edge cases in the new system.

So even if it will make you far more efficient there will be a temporary productivity slump as people get adjusted to it.

Ah, office theatre.

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