"Traditionally, salarymen (and they are, by the way, mostly men) are hired into a particular company late in university and stay at that company or its affiliates until they retire."
"The employee hereby promises the company: Your first obligation, in all things, will be to your company. You will work incredibly hard (90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment) on their behalf."
"Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake rather than because it actually accomplishes more productive work. Depending on one’s company, this overtime may be compensated or “service overtime” — “service” in Japanese means “thrown in for free in the hopes of gaining one’s further custom”, so your favorite restaurant might throw in a “service” desert once in a while or you might do 8 hours of “service” overtime six nights a week for 15 years."
The whole post is a great read that comes from a first-hand experience.
> > Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake
> That's just stupid.
That's overtime. Almost all overtime, even in the US, is as much about the appearance of working hard rather than any real gains in productivity.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been involved with or seen a startup that "crushes code 100 hours a week because we're out to win, man", with most of those late nights spent with a room full of people online shopping or on HN.
I'm productive for about 20-35 hours a week I'd say. Based on how interesting the problem is and luck. The other hours I spend trying to wade through my own feelings about being unproductive.
That's the thing though, it's an old-school Fordist concept that doesn't really apply to modern service/creative jobs. Time, like place, is not related to productivity anymore, modern employers need better metrics.
True. OP said overtime NEVER works. I think it works. Just differently in different fields.
I can code 80 hour weeks for a bit. Put out a ton of code. Can't do it for a month straight. But I could do manual labor overtime for a month straight.
Mm, yeah, manual labour is kind of a different story. I'm thinking programming or more generally knowledge-economy work. We have fairly precise numbers indicating that productivity goes net-negative when working much beyond 40/week after at most a couple of weeks.
You probably also earned additional pay (at a higher rate) for overtime - which can help justify spending the extra time there, at least if you value the money more than the free time lost. Which doesn't apply to salaried employees.
Yeah my current startup, no overtime, and all our projects are on schedule, everything is going great. Previous company required 80-100 hours a week basically for show, they would break more than got fixed because at 100 hours a week your body and brain reach the breaking point, completely unproductive.
I worked in Japan for a year at a 100 person startup (all Japanese people except for me). Anecdotally, people did seem to work a lot of hours but it was also felt like one of the most laid back environments in a way. It seemed like working all those hours allowed them to not be rushed. They were also pretty successful, and had as one of their goals to be like a "San Francisco startup" which may have made them a bit more of an exception instead of the rule. Also I worked primarily in SF at a lot of startups so that made it an easier transition for me.
I definitely saw salarymen on trains falling asleep or all heading out in packs to bars though, so I have no doubts about there being a very hard-working middle-class that also has extra-office obligations.
Reminds me of some college cultures actually. In architecture school you were almost expected to pull all-nighters for the sake of "being a dedicated architecture student". It is like hazing of some sort.
Never once pulled an all-nighter in college (ECE). I also never studied for more than 2-3 hours in succession. I always took a nice break between study sessions to let everything sink in.
On the other hand, most of my peers consistently stayed up through the night during examinations. Most of my peers studied in groups. I sat in on a few sessions and discovered that for every hour of study, an hour was spent on petty discussions. I stopped attending them since.
I'm now doing a PhD, so that may all change. I did fine during my first semester, so we'll just have to see.
YMMV - I was in college for six years, got a BS and MS in CS.
I was surrounded by people who, like you said, regularly stayed up all night prior to exams. Sometimes we even scheduled that: the students would organize study-group sessions from 10PM-til.
I had a policy then that, no matter what, I was going to get a full night's sleep. Period. Full stop. I think it served me very well. A quick refresher in the morning gave me probably as much recency in terms of memory, and personally, my brain just works a lot, lot better with plenty of sleep. Even if I didn't know an answer, it was a lot easier to stay calm and rationalize something that often turned out to be right or good enough.
I only felt a little bad about it once - in a math class I left the study group right before my bedtime, while still getting the notes they'd put together the rest of the night. I felt a little uneasy about not pulling my weight, so to speak, but oh well. It could have been scheduled earlier and I would have gladly stayed.
So I'd keep it up.
Nowadays things are a little different for me - a lot of my job unfortunately involves being present regardless of whether there's anything to actually do. I worked two-and-a-half days straight a couple months ago. No overtime pay. :\
> I had a policy then that, no matter what, I was going to get a full night's sleep. Period. Full stop. I think it served me very well.
I'm exactly the same! Unfortunately, sleep is extremely underrated nowadays.
Someone on Quora asked Jimmy Wales (yes, it's a thing) what he regretted not doing enough during his youth. His answer was getting enough sleep. His argument was that, as you grow older and get more responsibilities, you'll get less and less sleep, so why not get the most rest while you can?
> Even if I didn't know an answer, it was a lot easier to stay calm and rationalize something that often turned out to be right or good enough.
That's a very valuable skill in my opinion, and I think it carries over well to stressful situations in general.
I also never pulled an overnighter. I also never studied for more than 2-3 hours. In fact, I never studied for more than 15 minutes nor go to classes! (Semi) unrelated, I failed a lot of classes, dropped out and got a real job paying well doing something I love, ahead of many of my 'classmates'
Learning and study, along with their career path, is different for everyone.
I had a similar experience. Even through my PhD at a top-tier school in applied math, I didn't do "all-nighters" or cram sessions. In fact, after my first 2 years of PhD (where I regularly put in 80 hours a week because of the course load), I toned it down to 40-50 hours. I also didn't use performance enhancing drugs meant to treat things like ADHD.
I did (and still do) use a lot of coffee in the mornings. I also recommend going out to bars to have those petty discussions, so that socializing is reliably separated study.
Haha, yeah, I get you. It's probably because I don't like spending more time than necessary when it comes to studying. I'm a really heavy procrastinator otherwise.
Just out of curiosity, how old are you/when did you attend college? I ask because "back in the day" everyone knew.
If you were a cs student in 1995, you pretty much had to work in one of the basement labs. One of the profs liked to come to the lab at 3am before a deadline and laugh at us.
I was CS from 88-91 and everyone knew since we were either in the basement of one building or lab in another. Plus, everyone knew if you were online if you had the cash to be logged in from home. The joys of classes taught on an IBM 370 or VAX.
The social aspects of the old labs made for many memories and lessons.
I started my CS degree in 95, and did most of my coursework from my dorm, telnetting in to one of the Sparcs we were expected to write code on, eventually using X11 forwarding too. Wasn't any different resultswise than sitting with everyone else at terminals in the lab, though I guess I missed out on the social aspects of plowing through assignments in the same room together.
Yeah technically you could telnet in or do a remote X11, but you'd have to telnet to one of the machines in the lab, that someone was working on. So their processes would get priority since they were on the console, and sometimes people were asses and would boot you out so they could compile faster.
Also we didn't really have many people with laptops, so if you had a group project meeting in the lab was pretty much the only way you could all get computers but still interact with each other.
The crappy thing is that while this might be "back in the day", I still have to spend time cooped up in computer lab because software companies make the licenses way too expensive so we have nowhere else to do our homework.
Yes, this is a common theme for noobs everywhere. The older, cooler guys will let you in -- after you've been through the ringer and proven you really want to be in their special club.
That would have been tolerable for me, but considering I have been experiencing difference in overall sociological expectations by just visiting there, I don't know if I would have been truly happy if I were in that situation. I wasn't exactly "fit to their spec" back when I was living in Japan at young age, either.
And that somewhat aligns with my experience; perhaps the way personal relationships work probably more about where the company is located rather than who owns it.
For what it worth, I work for a wholly owned subsidiary of Japanese company in the States and I'm doing very well :-)
We are lucky enough to work in a very modern field with a different mindset in contrast to other jobs.
I'm at my 3rd company in Japan now and while some of my previous experiences were bad, it was really more the fault of the company with things you could easily find in other countries as well and not "because Japan".
A friend told me about their time in a New York finance company, where people showed up to the office on Saturday and watched TV on their computer because even if there wasn't any work to do you had to be seen putting the time in.
Most banking analysts (read: first 2 years out of college) have similar need to have 'butts in seats' for ~ noon to maybe 4 pm. In the morning you have to finish the work you didn't finish last night or your boss wants redone, and you get more work around 4 or 5 when the older people start leaving. But there's a few hours midday where you have absolutely nothing to do except browse the internet or try to sneak off to the gym.
Talking with recruiters there it sounded like it depends on the company more than the employee (traditional Japanese companies expect more 'loyalty'/hours than young and/or foreign-founded companies). However I've also heard that foreigners can 'get away' with more, whatever that means.
Expats often have "I'm not Japanese" as an excuse and a lower expectation of conformance.
To be clear this is not just a company issue it's a cultural issue. If the company does not have a policy of "go home at 6pm" the default culture everyone expects is "work late", especially for men.
Generally Japanese companies will send their liaison to the host country and having experienced this first hand I can say that liasions are expected to be available throughout the Japan day time.
After visiting Japan on several occasions for company related work, I can confirm this is true. However, there are labor laws that prevent certain types of workers from working overtime or even the weekends. However, the labor laws do not seem to apply to the management. Unclear on how the law works, but these were my observations.
Yes at some companies you start as a member of the union as a junior employee (even if you're an engineer or finance person), and after you're promoted to a certain level, you're part of management and are no longer part of the union.
My American brain tells me this is an insane way to live. No work life balance. It's horrible inefficient, as you can't downsize, or compete international like this. You're forced to hangout with coworkers.
However, having this long term stability with work is something that is sorely missed in the US. A pension? Job for life?
If you have a 401k benefit, you have a portable pension that you can take with you from job to job -- roll it into an individual retirement account when you're done.
If you don't have a 401k benefit, you can fund an IRA yourself.
Many folks are learning the hard way that you really don't want to bet your retirement on a single company remaining both solvent and honest for the next 70 years.
I'm young (24), so I guess I'm coming from a different mindset (entitled millennial here!), but the thought of working at a single place for life gives me nightmares.
Sure, companies 'evolve' (for better or worse) and theoretically your job changes as you climb the ladder, but surely you job learning and loving work if you do the same thing for 40+ years?
I guess this is the difference between people who see work as an obligation vs an opportunity.
University jobs as well. Almost no way to get fired, unless you are just flagrantly negligent. Huge amounts of paid time off, generally flexible hours. Middling salary but generally great benefits. Boring but stable and predictable. Some people like that.
"Traditionally, salarymen (and they are, by the way, mostly men) are hired into a particular company late in university and stay at that company or its affiliates until they retire."
"The employee hereby promises the company: Your first obligation, in all things, will be to your company. You will work incredibly hard (90+ hour weeks barely even occasion comment) on their behalf."
"Salarymen work large amounts of overtime, although much of it is for appearance’s sake rather than because it actually accomplishes more productive work. Depending on one’s company, this overtime may be compensated or “service overtime” — “service” in Japanese means “thrown in for free in the hopes of gaining one’s further custom”, so your favorite restaurant might throw in a “service” desert once in a while or you might do 8 hours of “service” overtime six nights a week for 15 years."
The whole post is a great read that comes from a first-hand experience.