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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder if Japan's work culture that demands long hours from workers disincentivizes time-saving "automation": In the US, where the expectation is closer to 40 hours, you don't have the luxury of always assuming employees will be cool putting in 10-12 hour days.

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> Japan's work culture that demands long hours from workers disincentivizes time-saving "automation"

I reckon it's more that initiative is not expected, or even discouraged. You will work on what the direct superior tells you, end of story. And the more people the boss can lord on, the bigger his empire looks like; so there is little incentive for middle-managers to pursue efficiency.

The long hours are largely for saving face in front of the team. Nobody leaves before the boss leaves, with full trickle down effect. So if the director is working until 9pm that means his managers are there until 9pm and then the staff is sitting at their desks looking busy-ish until 9pm, regardless of utility. Anybody who leaves early is not "giving their best" to the success of the team.

Hmm, my goal is to do something memorable during a workday and not just showing up.

Let alone the fact that in IT, you can rarely produce something worthwhile after 4-6 hours.

It would also be hard to respect arbitrarily chosen rules, that have no proven effect on productivity.

It's hard to see Japan being competitive with archaic rules like the above.

It's interesting that these things don't seem to matter that much. Japan isn't some basket case, it is a developed and wealthy country. This is all the more remarkable when you consider the demographic circumstances it faces.

I was an english teacher in Japan for 2 years at a junior high school.

The rep from a textbook company would go to the teacher's lounge every semester, bow to each of the teacher's one at a time in front of their desks, and ask them what they wanted to order from the catalog. The teacher's could've easily put in an order online or over the phone and I imagine the salesman had to go to each school in person.

The average Japanese employee works less hours per year than the average American, on what comes down to having an additional two weeks off per year (1713 vs 1783 hours worked annually [1]).

Of course, with statistics like these one has to consider the fact that second-income earners working part-time jobs make the statistic skew low, which means that in countries where wages are high enough to feed a family with only one parent working, the numbers will skew higher despite less actual hours worked. I am note sure to what degree the statistics address this issue.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Japan also doesn't report its work hours fully. The notorious 12 hour work days in Japan are not commonly reported as such. American workers by contrast are (properly) penny counters when it comes to overtime, shift differential, et al. Every hour they work over is going to get counted and credited. The US has stricter labor laws at this point than Japan does.

This list is useless.

If you compared two families using this same system:

* Family A - 1 worker, 40 hours per week, 1 non-worker

* Family B - 2 workers, 20 hours per week each

You'd get an average of 40 vs 20, which makes it appear as though Family A works "more" than Family B.

This uses the official numbers for average hours worked in Japan, which are definitely not accurate as a lot of overtime is unreported (and unpaid), especially at particularly bad companies.

>> The average Japanese employee

Employee is now a loaded word. Does this statistic include contractors or just hired "employees"? A great many workers in the US, from delivery drivers to doctors, are no longer actual employees. Do their hours count?

Not every company gives summer and winter breaks. These companies also have awful leave policies (on average less than 10 days for companies with breaks). None of them provide sick leave (you must use your standard leave for sick days).

Overtime, until very recently, went uncounted and was unpaid. So the statistics you quote are almost certainly very wrong.

Recently the government has been cracking down on overtime (and especially on unpaid overtime), and requires companies to track overtime. It's only considered excessive overtime if it's more than 45 hours extra hours a month, to give you an understanding of just how much people are working.

Recently at the same time, gov also enforces every employee must take at least 5 leave days in a year. What's happened in smaller companies is that they removed holidays at summer (exact: Obon) and at the end of year, and enforces employee to take leave days at the removed holidays exactly. Awful.

Does it demand just long hours or also a certain level of busyness?

As walking around with a clipboard looks a lot more busy than typing.

Having worked in a data center. The "walk around with the clipboard" kinda still happens. Except its a tablet that syncs up with an actual database instead of lots of useless paperwork. Easy enough to look just as busy with the tablet.

You can't stamp a tablet with your hanko, and faxing it is difficult as well. A tablet would require changing a lot of established procedures.

Could there one day be a stamp that also has an RFID/HSM inside, that signs things digitally but gives the same UX?

Like an amiibo?

>I sometimes wonder if Japan's work culture that demands long hours from workers

Japan is placed somewhere in the upper middle among OECD countries when it comes to average working hours per year and the percentage of workers working more than 60 hours per week.

Isn't it weird then that there are so many stories of massively overworked workers in Japan?

I wonder if those statistics are wrong, or perhaps misleading.

Using that same example, you could consider American statistics misleading. US studies show that wage theft by corporations is a multi billion dollar a year industry. Things like that lead to underreporting of actual hours worked, hence, skewing statistics.

There are a large number of workers in Japan. Even a mid-range percentage of a large number could be "so many".

By all means, the statistics could very well be wrong or misleading, but the number of stories you've heard isn't really evidence.

There were (or are) many workers work overtime without salary paid, they would be won't displayed in statistics.

You cannot find any useful information about Japan in English. For some reason orientalism makes people abandon all common sense.

You might be onto something. I read in a book about the world's economic history and why the industrial revolution started in the UK that one of the likely reasons was the rising expense of labour which forced businesses to then find more efficient ways to work which lead to machines and industrialization. So basically In any setting with a surplus of cheap labour this incentive simply isn't there.

I'm not sure if I buy that logic. The U.S. is also on the high side, in terms of average annual hours worked.

If we tried to extrapolate that hypothesis, shouldn't it imply that countries with considerably lower averages (e.g.: Germany, France, Sweden) ought to be considerably further ahead in automation than they currently are?

I do not know how automation is measured, but a couple Americans I've met here in Norway has said that automation is higher here.

Well, Japan has deflation/extremely low inflation which encourages bullshit jobs as people are desperate to work anywhere.

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