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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a Japanese corporation.

The Tokyo offices had enormous rooms, with long rows of desks, arranged by section/department. The section manager's desk was at the end of each row. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had small, schoolteacher-style desks, in the corner of the room.

These enormous rooms, with hundreds of engineers, were quiet as a library. They had carpeting, people wore "office slippers," and there was very little chit-chat.

American open-plan offices, on the other hand, resemble flea markets. Loud, somewhat chaotic, and distracting as hell.

But the Japanese also have a culture that is attuned to open-plan offices. When we would bring them to the US, they would be uncomfortable with cubicles and offices.

I have found that "one-size-fits-all" solutions, don't really work, across cultural boundaries.

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I worked for a Japanese corporation where each floor had different rules.

One floor had an open-plan layout where people were open to chitchat, another open-plan floor that expected everyone to be quiet, and there was a floor with reservable cubicles or sound-proofed rooms. In general though, I do agree that the culture is on the quieter side.

I really enjoyed working there because the level of isolation was entirely up to you, depending on your mood.

We kind of have that, but it isn't by floor since its a one-story building, but we are an American small tech company. The engineering department (department I am in) is separated by a long glass wall. In side of there, we are expected to keep it quiet. Now, we are not discouraged from conversation, say I need to tap another engineer's shoulders and discuss some architecture. But it expected to keep it relatively quiet and not distracting. Other side of the glass wall, its a free for all.

Sounds like the Amtrak quiet car for early morning routes. I loved the quiet car.

this is how most university libraries are set up

In the USA, perhaps. An amusing statement really, given the context.

Rakuten was the first and only bigger corp I've worked at (my life has been startups and boutique shops) and so I have had a hard time understanding why people don't like open office floorplans. Thank you for making me realize why I enjoyed it and might not, at another org.

Was it a Japanese office or a foreign office following Japanese customs?

I would say it fits in a third category. It’s a Japanese office that switched to English as its official language and hires a lot of foreign engineering talent. These types of companies are becoming more and more prevalent in Japan.

It is interesting to note that they can integrate the best and worst elements of both aforementioned work cultures.

You worked in kevinmershon's office?

Either way it's interesting such offices are becoming more common in Japan. Could you say more about how they integrate the best and worst of both cultures?

I worked at a similar type of office, but I had coworkers who also had interned/worked for Rakuten.

These are based on the accounts of my local coworkers, but their experiences with previous traditional Japanese companies involved strict social hierarchies, long working hours, constant overtime[0] and overall a very oppressive work culture (though this is slowly improving in general). Getting a chance to escape all that while still working for a local company that really understood them is a huge win. As a foreigner, they made it really easy for me to integrate into their work without feeling like an outsider (which is unfortunately a common trope in more traditional offices).

There is a spectrum to this. For example, I’ve heard Rakuten has a lot of bad rep with a bunch of foreign engineers I’ve met. They still have a lot of “traditional” influence in their management culture that I’ve heard has created a high turnover rate on the foreigner side. This Reddit thread last year also was a hot topic that led to a small exodus[1] and some of their Glassdoor reviews are scathing.

On a side note, the government actually takes some interest in these companies too through inspections, as they seem to observe how well-integrated foreign talent can be with Japanese offices. I’m assuming they’re looking long term to increase immigration to compensate the decrease in local talent from the declining population…

Please do take these as stories and not fact. Experiences can wildly differ from company to company and I’m just one perspective.

[0] I recall a story where a company made employees “tap-out” but not actually leave the office to get around government regulations.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/s/LmIxQUPakW

Your mention of working culture is quite interesting. I am a Mexican and have had the chance to work in "open offices" environments in UK, US and Mexico.

For me, US and UK culture was great for Open Office plan, as people were pretty silent and focused. Our Mexican culture is just crazy for that... we are noisy and chatty people, very "happy", and for that reason you just cannot focus in an open office environment. I enjoyed every time I went to our US office in a previous job, as we could actually sit down and work silently.

In the UK it was similar, but I worked in an international setting. So we had people from China, Iran and other nationalities in the same open office, and it was noisier. But not as noisy as Mexico, as people were not very "integrated" with each other.

I would hate that due to the visual distractions and lack of privacy, but "quiet as a library" is absolutely essential.

It does sound like that office layout (as with most US office layouts) is designed to clearly reinforce the status hierarchy.

> clearly reinforce the status hierarchy

Oh, yeah. Hierarchy is very important, in Japanese business culture.

To emphasize hierarchy, it's common to give cheap office chairs without wrist rest for who aren't at high hierarchy in traditional companies . It's one of the worst way, it harms health.

I did a year as an exchange student in secondary school/senior high school in Japan. We were close to 50 pupils per class room - yet it was much more quiet than my Norwegian classroom with half as many pupils.

Not a praise of the outdated Prussian high school system in Japan - but another illustration that the culture is different.

Is it outdated? How do the results compare?

Which results? Evaluating school systems is an unsolved problem.

Japanese business culture is a standard that I hope we never follow. It results in extreme stress for their workers and one of their leading times for suicide is the yearly hiring/firing/moving people around cycle; Japanese industry is an extremely well oiled machine, but in order to achieve that, people are treated like machine parts.

I think there's a good balance to be struck, but I prefer Western work culture by far.

Leveraging my extensive rapid-paced AI-augmented automation experience*, I have discovered an innovative, self-service solution utilizing a revolutionary, modern material that dynamically shapes itself to fit an external acoustic meatus and turn even the loudest office into a harmonious, quite garden of productivity.**.

* I did manual labor on a factory production line to pay the bills in college

** Put 20 cent earplugs in your ear

"one-size-fits-all" solutions are the prevailing business strategy of investment bankers: Make every company run exactly the same, and save on cost by commoditizing the materials and people.

I have found that North American divisions of Japenese companies will be setup the same way. The managers sit at the front facing into the room. All of their subordinates will be facing towards them.

Toyota sticks out in my mind, only because of the scale of the room. There were hundreds of desks in one large open space, and if you looked up from your desk you could see every last one of them. But I’ve seen it in other smaller Japenese companies as well.

Aah yes this is why I work in an open office yet very confused on why this website hates it so much.

May I ask what you think of life in Japan as a foreigner? I’ve heard it can be very isolating.

I wouldn't know. I just visited. Sometimes, two or three times a year, for about twenty years. Always the Tokyo area.

I probably spent three weeks there, max.

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