I am quite bearish about the impact of WFH, especially for software engineers, but if there is one country where I think the coronavirus can have a huge positive effect for the economy, it is Japan.
Japanese companies are generally extremely inefficient. Outside of a few powerhouses, partially thanks to a protected and large domestic market, Japanese labor practices are antiquated. There is a culture of overwork that begets a culture of inefficiency that boggles the mind. Few people know that Japan has a labor productivity lower than Italy, for example.
To give a concrete example, you will have companies where people will make sure to start meetings at 7 pm to make sure they can maximize "残業" (overtime). The labor ministry is trying to curb on companies that expect more than 80 hours of overtime per month. On top of it, if you live in one of the big city (Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka), 3 hours of commute per day is not atypical. And then you have the practice of 飲み会 ("business dinners" where people drink, abuse toward women common, etc.), which also takes time.
Finally, Japanese companies rely a lot on paper and 判子 (hanko) and other seals systems. My wife sometimes has to go the desk of a colleague dozens of times a day to get some paperwork. IT systems are antiquated. And yet, Japan has one of the most educated workforce in the world. Especially women are often relegated to menial work. Internet is fast everywhere. It is the true steam punk country !
Coronavirus and WFH change this. Seeing large companies like fujitsu publicly taking a stance is highly significant in a country like Japan where executives are often extremely risk adverse.
>There is a culture of overwork that begets a culture of inefficiency that boggles the mind. Few people know that Japan has a labor productivity lower than Italy, for example.
If you spent so much time at the workplace like the Japanese you end up with a low producivity on paper pretty much by definition, because it's simply output divided by amount of time worked.
But I wouldn't overestimate the importance of computerization on productivity which is actually extremely low. Here in Germany we have a similar paper culture (although not quite as extreme) but very high labour productivity. The Japanese could simply go home or work a day less and their productivity would go up, it's not really comparable to much of Italy. (except the north of italy which is actually also extremely productive).
>If you spent so much time at the workplace like the Japanese you end up with a low producivity on paper pretty much by definition, because it's simply output divided by amount of time worked.
It is not as simple as that: in general, more developed countries tend to have higher labor productivity. Japan has been historically low for several decades.
I'm no specialist of labor statistics, but note that Japan actaually worked fewers hours than Italy , accoding to OECD anyaway: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS. I am pretty sure that most people unfamiliar w/ Japan would not place its productivity as low as it is, close to countries like Turkey or Slovakia.
>Here in Germany we have a similar paper culture (although not quite as extreme) but very high labour productivity
I am familiar with both countries, worked in both, and it is nowhere near comparable. But paper is only part of it. The overtime culture is quite intense. I still vividly remember my first work experience in Japan > 15 years ago, with 3-4 hours-long meetings where half the members, including the lab's head, were sleeping.
For work hours, maybe because many Japanese women works as "part time job" due to discrimination and some tax/insurance system. Statistics by gender maybe reflects it.
Over 40 years as a professional I have worked in tech companies in countries around the world, including Germany and Japan, and now in Austria - where the reduced work week is not only a cultural norm, but rather supported by the bureaucratic classes as their right and obligation. Kafka and Vienna, mmkay...
My anecdotal experience is that I think the most fun, and therefore most productive place to work in the Western world so far, for me anyway - was the good ol' USA.
Sure, the 80 hour work weeks were killer. But, the camaraderie, coordination, and just fun getting-shit-done'ness of the average American company exceeds most others.
But only if there was no daily commute, because a daily commute in America is a sheer kind of hell that nobody should tolerate - in which case, Japan or Austria are definitely the lifestyle/work balance leaders, even though they are far lazier cultures - Germany too, to some extent, but I could generalise about Germany until my holzhacker is burned to a crisp, and it'd still taste great.
Anyway, the reduced work week culture can be observed around the world. I think, the efficacy of the culture matters too, though. Germans admire rigor, Austrians reward laziness - Japanese, duplicity - and America, getting things done no matter what.
One major issue with paper vs digital is that paper scales really, really badly. IIRC (I can't find the article) there was a marked difference between how easy it was to access COVID benefits in Korea (where the process was entirely digital) vs Japan (where you had to show up to an office and fill out paperwork)
You didn't have to go to an office to get your COVID benefits. They mailed a brief, mostly prefilled form to your home and you put in your bank details and a copy of your ID to mail back.
You may be thinking of people rushing to get their applications in for their NFC-capable "My Number" cards, which haven't been very popular... that was entirely optional and gave you access to a digital version of the same thing.
They also care very much about their job title, and the job titles of the people they are dealing with. A few years ago my company (American) worked with a Japanese company and before we went into the meetings we had to establish new job titles for the people on our team that would be representing our company in the meeting. We couldn't go in there with just a bunch of senior engineers when they were sending their VP of Engineering. It wouldn't have gone over well.. We had to have a Director of Engineering, Senior Director of Mobile, VP of North American Engineering. Etc.
These were all just regular very good senior engineers. But it would have been insulting to go to the meeting without the inflated titles.
It would be funny if that wouldn't be so widely spread in other countries too. I have a fancy title that sounds nice on various levels. People's attitude changes completely: they listen to me,some even try not to say something wrong and etc. Oh, and I'm popular amongst sales people,who want to sell me all sorts of solutions because they assume I sit on a big budget. It's a circus.
This bleeds into their North American operations too. Nowhere else in my career have I seen a more wretched hive of incestual politicking, inefficiency, lack of respect for lower workers, and obsession with beaucracy at Panasonic’s American operations
Reminds me of when my past employer sent me to Japan to debug a firmware issue for a potential customer. Every day for a week I had to spend two hours talking to their engineers talking about my debug decision tree for debug work for the rest of the day. And that was with an English/Japanese translator to help communicate. Most people adapt their debug strategy as they collect more data but they wanted it all planned out ahead. A very different way of doing it.
The bug was very specific to their use case and they wouldn't help us replicate it in our labs so I never figured it out until a year later helping another customer. It was a bug in counter wraparound handling.
I have been working as an IT guy in Japan for almost two years now, and that's pretty much my experience. Everything has to be explained in ridiculous amount of detail and hanko-stamped by 20 bosses before you can start doing anything.
Which is quite ridiculous when your work strategy needs to change as you collect more data, as you said.
I'm learning to just do my job without telling them anything, and later writing all the required documents.
So the question is how do these companies still manage to sustain competitive pressures ? I guess the answer is that once you have a moat, internal efficiency is not that big of a factor.
I work for a public research institution, so I can't tell you about private companies. My guess is that, because everybody does the same, the don't feel any pressure to improve.
When I visited Japan I couldn't help repeating over and over to myself that it's a country with one foot firmly in the future and another foot stuck firmly in the past.
It's one of the most fascinating things I love about Japan.
This is what benmw333 is referring to. The Panasonic Let's. Despite how bulky it looks, it weighs about the same as the macbook air. It's basically used by anyone who isn't a manager, designer or software developer. You see them everywhere.
Panasonic tends to refresh internals while keeping externals the same, although performance still sucks.
This variant was once offered in the US market something like a decade ago for "business-rugged" use under the Toughbook brand, but that magnesium exterior shell commanded a high price point; I suspect the ThinkPad T series would have been a direct competitor at the time with better performance options and being much cheaper.
Yep, I owned one that I purchased in 2008. Mine was the size of a typical netbook (of course they had models with normal sizes), yet it was a fully featured laptop.
The case was from magnesium alloy and it weighted exactly 2 lbs (less than a book of the same size I couldn't tell I had it in my backpack).
Perhaps today it might not seem like a feat but that was 12 years ago.
I used to work on software with a lot of international customers. On every release we had to go through rigorous testing to ensure our product could be installed off of CD-ROMs solely for use by the Japanese market.
This was 10 years ago, but even then CD-ROMs seemed antiquated. It doesn't surprise me that Japan would be one place they're still common.
Well, Japanese love CDs. If I'm not mistaken, Japan is the place where collecting music CDs and such still is very much a thing. I think it's pretty nice, really.
IMO Most Japanese tech geeks laughs why MacBook Air is advertised as "light" laptop. There are more lighter and more functional laptops available in Japan.
People in Japan still buy and use a lot of physical media. Piracy of every kind is more harshly punished and strangely, compared to the US, people feel that they should buy the work of artists they enjoy to support them. There’s also thriving secondary markets for everything from CDs to movies to games if you can’t afford to purchase new.
I owned CF-R7 decade ago, and running Linux was very enjoyable. No drivers were needed and almost everything worked.
The only thing that Linux lacked at the time was ability to turn on-off economy mode (at the time never seen that in laptops, it was to keep charge at 80% to extend battery life). I needed to boot to windows to switch that. And functional/multimedia keys although I was able to find software to get that to work.
I like 1995 era laptops more than modern ones. I also like the the plastic casings of desktops back then—they feel solid, same with the mechanical keyboards!
Today companies so busy trying to “slim things down.”
P.S. why doesn’t apple release a matte display laptop? I would buy it.
Apple used to release matte display laptops. You used to be able to get a hulking 17 inch macbook pro with an optional matte display. Today, you can buy a $15 matte film.
because the reason matte is matte, is that it scatters light hitting the screen. from either side of the screen. you didn't notice how blurry your screen was when it was already blurry from the low resolution. now screens have high resolution.
feel free to put a matte transparency on your high density screen to make it a low density screen. everyone else would rather have glare.
How does this square with for example the Japanese car market, which I thought led the world in labour practices and efficiency? They've invented many labour practices that are considered the best we have today. And their cars are so cheap - how are they doing this if they aren't being efficient?
For example are Toyota's engineering and factories running on wasted meeting time, fax machines, and hand-written letters? Doesn't seem likely. If they are it seems to produce great results!
An assembly-line is a machine designed to avoid the need for synchronous human decision-making. Instead, there are only synchronous machine decisions, and asynchronous human decisions based on e.g. sampling, or spotting.
There are synchronous human tasks in some assembly-lines, but as long as they're rote tasks, inefficiency usually isn't introduced. Humans working as if they were machines, are rarely inefficient; and if they are, this inefficiency is "legible" for blue-collar work in a way that it isn't for white-collar work, so an inefficient human "part" can be, er, swapped out.
The whole "thing" that Toyota did to revolutionize car manufacturing, was essentially to make quality-assurance part of the same ground-level machine (i.e. make it a computed outcome of a series of "dumb" machine and worker steps), rather than making it a separate auditing process. As such, they essentially squeezed the ability to be inefficiency/incompetent out of the QA process.
> The whole "thing" that Toyota did to revolutionize car manufacturing, was essentially to make quality-assurance part of the same ground-level machine
Where can I read more about it? I find it hard to imagine, how QA could possibly be a function of manufacturing process, since pretty much the sole purpose of it is to spot when "dumb" manufacturing process failed you a couple of steps ago. I mean, a lot of QA is pretty dumb too (like testing a party of 1000 details by breaking 10 of them), but there is nothing new about that specifically.
> since pretty much the sole purpose of it is to spot when "dumb" manufacturing process failed you a couple of steps ago
This is really not correct, a quality based approach to design and engineering will likely change your entire process (for good or for ill ... probably both).
> For example are Toyota's engineering and factories running on wasted meeting time, fax machines, and hand-written letters? Doesn't seem likely. If they are it seems to produce great results!
I used to work at Toyota, although it might have changed since I was there (I doubt it changed significantly, though).
The factories and supply chain seemed well optimized. This is a huge cost in producing cars, so it makes sense to focus on this even over engineering productivity, to some extent.
But engineering certainly did involve lots of meetings, paper documents with hanko seals, and antiquated IT systems.
So manufacturing is generally quite efficient. Toyota would be one of the powerhouse I had in mind, as would be most car companies. Note that Toyota is very much a global company and under the pressure of competition worldwide. But many large Japanese companies aren't.
>For example is Toyota also thriving on wasted meeting time, fax machines, and hand-written letters? Doesn't seem likely.
I don't want to go too much in specifics, but the examples I gave are actually coming from a company whose sole client is a large car company.
The inefficiency is generally limited to white collar workers. Japanese blue collar workers are very efficient. Also, internationally competitive companies like Toyota often (but not always) have better business practices.
I believe that's an issue of manufacturing efficiency vs. corporate efficiency. Toyota invented "lean manufacturing", but that doesn't mean that their biz dev, marketing department, etc isn't massively inefficient. I'm not saying they are, just that the two are orthogonal.
how are they doing this if they aren't being efficient?
As somebody driving a Toyota they simply don't add too many gimmicks and options are usually limited to just trim levels and maybe a few bundles you can buy separately. Overall it's a far cry from e.g. German manufacturers where the configuration form can have tens of items from which you can pick and choose.
Also apparently creative work such as software engineering lends itself to inefficiencies, because the outcome isn't easily measurable. You have to have a culture that accepts irreducible uncertainty to navigate in such an environment.
Japanese companies have a baffling knack for internal innovation that kind of transcends the overwhelming management style.
All the overtime and useless meetings produce a lot of decisions by consensus that balance out the random “maverick” ideas a VP might come up with. This creates a bizarre balancing act that sometimes produces decently market-synced products.
Also the just crazy amount of seasonality in Japan makes even the slowest moving company make large pivots at least four times a year. New season? New product, even if it’s weird and nobody wanted it, they figure out how to sell it and get 1500 workers to all shift left at the same time.
Many products in the Japanese market are well designed, durable, functional and cost-efficient, this is not something specific to cars.
When it comes to computer products, I am a fan of REALFORCE keyboards, which are manufactured in Japan. They have really made a difference in my day to day work.
Have you cross shopped vehicles lately? Your statement is arguably true about Nissan and Nissan only.
Japanese light vehicles typically carry an initial price premium that self perpetuates for a whole host of reasons beyond the scope of this discussion.
>Can you cite a self perpetuating instance of the price premium ownership?
The marginal difference between buyers of various vehicles and their intended use affects how those vehicles age and how they are perceived and valued by consumers over time. I'm gonna make a whole bunch of generalizations that are true at the margins (but obviously exceptions abound), please don't take them personally and hold your outrage until the end.
I think it's easier to explain in the opposite direction (i.e negative loop where customers reduce the premium-ness of the product) so I'll do that one first. For that case I present Jeep SUVs (other than the Wrangler). These vehicles are cheap up front and Chrysler financing will write a loan to anyone with a pulse. That means that proportionately a lot more of these vehicles get sold to people who are in an economic position where loading the back seat full of bags of concrete makes more sense than renting a truck if you catch my drift. These people tend to decline maintenance that isn't absolutely necessary, they will let a wheel bearing grind and let things wobble until payday, tow a trailer a little too big, etc, etc. The vehicles they own just get treated a lot harder all around than the vehicles of people with more wiggle room in their budget. And as you'd expect that means there's a lot more examples of these vehicles on the used market in rough shape with lots of little issues. That drives down the value, makes them more accessible to the same kind of people on the used market and the cycle feeds itself and Jeep SUVs are perceived as cheap and low class.
An example in the positive direction (premium customers giving a vehicle a good reputation) would be Toyota pickups and SUVs. When new they're moderately more expensive than the competition so the people for who are already stretching things to afford that class of vehicle (e.g. midsize SUV) never get their hands on them. As a result they get more often bought by people who are in a position to justify treating them well and keeping them nice so at any given age they'll have less hard use on them and be relatively nicer and better maintained than the competition. Because the examples around are in nice shape (and priced accordingly) people think they're inherently nice cars. That makes them hold their value even further. That means even when they're old the price premium helps keep them out of the hands of the people who have no better option but to use them hard and run them into the ground. It's a positive feedback loop that's keeping them "premium"
An even more scientific (less variables) example (albeit dated) of the same thing on the domestic side of the isle with the Mercury Grand Marquis. Old people bought them and mostly treated them nicely and they held their value very well compared to comparable sedans of other makes and the identical Crown Vics that were the staple of fleets. If you take an equivalently optioned 'Vic and Grand Marquis in equivalent condition/mileage the Grand Marquis will be worth more for no reason other than the badge on the grill implies nicer condition on the used market. Same engine, same trans, same cloth seats but the difference in buyer demographics had an effect on how well the vehicles aged and the Grand Marquis will be worth more because of it.
Basically Japanese vehicles traditionally target and get sold to a slightly more premium customer and they carry that premium their whole way down the economic ladder as they age.
Source: Extensive personal experience in the bottom price bracket of the used car industry.
I worked there under a very common payment model called みなし残業 (minashi-zangyou), meaning my contract gave me a minimum monthly pay which assumed a certain amount of overtime (40 hours a month in my case, meaning no additional pay was provided until surpassing 40 hours overtime in a month). This was really awful because I could be made to feel guilty for not staying late, and superiors had no qualms about keeping me. I naively accepted the contract (it was a permanent contract, highly sought after) and at some point realized that the pay was not at all worth it (about 42k a year). This was not the kind of job I could sleep at, either!
I wouldn't interpret 飲み会 in that way. Yes people drink there but I wouldn't claim that women abuse is somehow common there. From my experience Japanese are quite polite even if there are drunk.
I have seen behavior that would be guaranteed to get a sexual harassment suit in the US in pretty much every company I worked at, big and small, public and private.
That starts to date now but I have been at karaoke parties where some guys would be naked w/ a sock on their dick dancing. I also had to several times make sure women would get back safely because some colleagues clearly tried to get them to miss their last train and go to a love hotel.
Japan is a country where still today politicians can say that women after 40 are useless because cannot procreate. For the very few public sexual harassment affairs, the common defense of the perpetrator is to claim the woman was looking for it. It is victim blaming all the way down.
Japan exists simultaneously 100 years in the past, and 100 years in the future. Averaging out it's still like living in 2020, but for each small interaction you never know if you'll be facing the 1920 experience or the 2120 experience.
There's a difference between being relegated and being interested. He's saying that current business culture causes many women to work menial office jobs, not that the women themselves are not ambitious.
Really interesting comment, I know a bit about the salary-man culture with business men asleep in subways/alleys as they had dinner drinking sessions that extended past the last subway ride back to their home stations. I wonder how this practice came to be culturally? Was it something that manifested after WWII where the country felt like it needed to 'catch up' to the US and other allied countries? Or was this always a thing there? As for paper, calligraphy is a revered art form there, as well as stationary and writing letters. So being really into paper and forms does not surprise me.
Japanese companies are generally extremely inefficient. Outside of a few powerhouses, partially thanks to a protected and large domestic market, Japanese labor practices are antiquated. There is a culture of overwork that begets a culture of inefficiency that boggles the mind. Few people know that Japan has a labor productivity lower than Italy, for example.
To give a concrete example, you will have companies where people will make sure to start meetings at 7 pm to make sure they can maximize "残業" (overtime). The labor ministry is trying to curb on companies that expect more than 80 hours of overtime per month. On top of it, if you live in one of the big city (Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka), 3 hours of commute per day is not atypical. And then you have the practice of 飲み会 ("business dinners" where people drink, abuse toward women common, etc.), which also takes time.
Finally, Japanese companies rely a lot on paper and 判子 (hanko) and other seals systems. My wife sometimes has to go the desk of a colleague dozens of times a day to get some paperwork. IT systems are antiquated. And yet, Japan has one of the most educated workforce in the world. Especially women are often relegated to menial work. Internet is fast everywhere. It is the true steam punk country !
Coronavirus and WFH change this. Seeing large companies like fujitsu publicly taking a stance is highly significant in a country like Japan where executives are often extremely risk adverse.