>However, not every government worker seems to be on-board - according to the SMG, 67.1% of government workers have asked to be exempt from the forced lights-out.
They asked to be exempt entirely on their own volition, or their managers "politely" asked them to consider sending in an exemption request? And this isn't a question in earnest because I already know the answer.
I'm someone who works a lot of overtime, and yet no manager has ever asked me to work overtime. The reason for putting these rules in place is because for some people (myself included) working overtime is something that they do habitually -- even when they shouldn't.
Now that's not to say that my managers are not complicit in that. Working as a programmer, I find there is not much time pressure during the day (unless you break your server), but you have this long term stress where you are thinking, "I need to get X,Y, and Z done by <some date>". Often those deadlines are even self imposed. In fact, it is a normal underhanded trick to get programmers to estimate and commit to dates knowing that they are overwhelmingly optimistic. But the fact remains that in general we walk willingly into those long hours.
I've also worked at a high school in Japan and while the stress is different, the results are the same. I used to hate national holidays because I knew that my workload wouldn't change. It just meant that I had one day less to get my work done, which is basically a whole lot more stress during the week in exchange for some random, government imposed "day off". I take my "day off" and my students get a crap class later that week (or if I'm really organised, two weeks later). I feel bad because I want every single one of my classes to rock.
But to get to the point, if someone said that I had to turn off my computer at some government imposed time of the day, you're damn right I'd want an exception -- because otherwise there will be weeks where I won't get my work done. I will feel bad because I want to get my work done and I hate the idea of screwing over the customer because, "Well, not my fault! I have to go home".
Of course, you are perfectly correct to say that there is something very broken in that equation. You are wrong to assume that it's the evil manager to is squashing everybody under their thumb. I've had some right asses as managers before, but the vast majority have been wonderful, caring, people who have exactly the same illness I do.
That's why you mandate going home time, despite how much someone complains.
The problem here in Asia is every manager loves working day and night, destroying their family life (or preventing themselves from even having one) and developing zero interests outside of work until they're of retirement age.
The problem is that the people under the manager aren't all like this. Especially not 67.1% of them.
The problem is that the vast majority of managers will ask you why you're in such a hurry to leave. It's only 8 o'clock and I'm still here. Are you implying that your business is more important than mine? Everyone else is staying here, so why are you leaving so soon? You know, if you keep leaving early, our division might not do well enough and we can't pay bonuses (which are really a full month's income that we deduct from your normal pay hold over your head for times like this). Is your wife asking you to come home early? I don't think a woman like that is good for you.
I'll be frank, you're an exception. Most people here don't want to work overtime. The problem is they know that they need to, and they need to pretend to want to, or they'll be dealing with stuff like this every single day. Programmers are odd folks and we tend to like solving problems on our own, and money only makes it better. The average office worker in Japan making Excel spreadsheets at a rate of 2 boxes an hour isn't eager to be sitting there any longer. They're just know kacho will be on them and making them feel worthless because they're young and don't know the value of sacrificing their valuable life for the monetary gain of the CEO who inherited the company from his dad and never worked a day in his life.
People who sleep more and do less overtime are more productive than those doing needless overtime. And when it comes to Asia, virtually all overtime is needless overtime. If work piles up from basic holidays or not putting in excess time, there are one of two problems: people aren't using their time properly, or more likely, companies should be hiring more people.
I suppose we've had different experiences. I think virtually everyone would like to leave earlier, but the point is that they also don't want to disappoint. In my experience, it's not about kacho watching over them -- they'd still be there if kacho went home (and I've personally seen that the few times kacho went home early). The kacho is only there to be loyal to the workers -- he wants to leave too. Or at the very least he wants to go out for a drink.
There definitely are people watching the clock and desperately trying to look busy while doing nothing, but again my experienced is that those people are pretty much despised by everybody else on the floor. There is a ton of work to be done.
I only ever worked at the one school, but I have a really hard time believing that my school had exceptional workers. In fact, it was ranked near the bottom and was the place that problem teacher were sent in order to improve.
We could argue about this forever I suppose. I don't disagree that the work methodology is needlessly inefficient, but I strongly disagree that your first sentence is true. The work culture here is different and everybody participates in it. There are parts of the work culture here I miss now that I'm working remotely for a UK company -- especially the dedication to working as a team.
I was born and raised in South Korea, and I have multiple years' worth of work experience in my home country. While I do agree that this argument could most definitely go both ways, I do think that 67% of workers opting to stay longer goes on to show just how prevalent the concept of "face-timing" at work really is in my country, regardless of which profession you work in. I can personally attest to many nights - more than majority of my work days, in fact - where I've found myself and my teammates working (or pretending to, at least) late into the night, just because my manager gave no signs of leaving anytime soon.
Unlike here in the States, individualism is not a value that society values; rather, it's essentially frowned upon. Confucianism manifests itself in modern society by being extended into the workplace; the idea of "we're all in this together" is almost forced upon workers, even in situations where it's clearly more of an individual thing. When your manager is working up until 10PM, I don't think a lot of Koreans would find it easy to leave work at 7PM, even when the work that's been allocated to her/him has been done.
"The problem is that the vast majority of managers will ask you why you're in such a hurry to leave. It's only 8 o'clock and I'm still here. Are you implying that your business is more important than mine? Everyone else is staying here, so why are you leaving so soon? You know, if you keep leaving early, our division might not do well enough and we can't pay bonuses (which are really a full month's income that we deduct from your normal pay hold over your head for times like this). Is your wife asking you to come home early? I don't think a woman like that is good for you."
Wow. There's no other way to say it: Those people are straight up evil.
This is BS, "feeling bad" because you didn't finish your work. There's always more work to do. You will never finish it all. Why doesn't the manager "feel bad" for making you work so much even though you like it. Some of us do like having a life away from work
Yes, I really think that the majority of workers feel that going home earlier will decrease their happiness at work rather than increase it. Therefore they requested an exemption. Would they like the system to be improved so that they don't have to work late? Yes, I think they want that.
My issue is with the characterisation that it is management that is forcing them to stay late. At least in my experience (in Japan) it just isn't true. It's just the work culture and everybody plays into it. That's why the government has to (and does) get involved.
I'll stop posting about this because it's one of the things that frustrates me to no end. It's super easy to to jump to the conclusion that Asian companies and managers are just these monsters that chew up their employees without remorse, but I really think it is a widespread misunderstanding of cultural differences.
Such selfless dedication to the customer. If only you were as dedicated to causes that didn’t involve making money. You seem to not be able to set boundaries for yourself, but somehow still work tirelessly, for what?
I remember when I first started working full time (in the UK). There is (was?) some kind of EU working time directive that prevented you from working more than some amount of hours per week, but could be opted out of. My new manager gave me the form, and I got the impression it was just a formality - everyone opts out.
This is Bizarro world for me. Until I read this article I couldn't conceive that government workers working too hard would be an issue. Not that we don't have government workers who have to work really hard in the USA. But that seems to be the exception and not the rule. I am more used to watching the reflection of a game of Solitaire off of workers glasses while dozens of people wait in line.
I get that it's apparently a problem there, but what are they doing right where more than half the government workforce are asking to be allowed to work late? Or are they just milking overtime pay? The latter would definitely fit much more comfortably into my experience.
Edit: "My experience" being running a small business for 7 years that required interacting with various local government employees from many different municipalities. The vast majority were very nice people, but my company (and my competitors) were run way more efficiently, and always using the latest technologies. I think it comes down to motivation and human nature. Sometimes they would casually do things that completely screwed over everyone that relied on them, in the worst places such things would be done on purpose for political reasons. The office just got asked to reduce expenses by 5%? Cut the hours for customer facing tasks by 50% so the public feels the pain and complains to the mayor.
Most people working for government you know are also young. So you hear about the crazy amount of work they do. But here is the thing: they have to work this much because old government employees do nothing. And after 5 or 10 years busting their asses while they see lazy people not getting fired and getting their raises they'll start putting 2 and 2 together and cut back on work to focus on their family and hobbies. Or work at office politics as it is the best way to get a better pay.
One part is true: I am relatively young. But I have very rarely met government employees my age. If I had to guess, standard would be 35, but have met plenty of folks who are 50+ working in government (something I don’t see in the startup scene at all). Most of them are likely underpaid; however, to be fair, that’s often made up in health benefits and likely somewhat in retirement benefits. And while I don’t doubt there are lazy government employees, the presumption that they outnumber or even match the private sector in this regard rings as false.
Yeah, I've never understood that characterization. The government as a system is inefficient, precisely because it doesn't operate on a profit motive.
But that's a systemic problem, not an individual one. Most of the people I know who work in government do so at a substantial pay cut compared to private sector work, and precisely because they're engaged and driven.
Why do people still believe that profit motive = efficient? My employer is plenty profit-driven, but a coworker just spent five days dicking around doing nothing because his computer broke and we’re too incompetent to provide adequate spare resources. Don’t tell me the profit motive makes organizations efficient.
It's a misleading simplification. Profit motive (or "private sector") is not equal to efficiency. But it's a strong motivator for it. Not perfect though, and the further you are from getting outcompeted and dying, the more space you have for inefficiencies to creep in.
One of the big sources of inefficiency affects governments and companies the same - the difficulty of keeping an organization functioning grows superlinearly with the number of people in it. That's why in a small company, if your computer breaks, you can just borrow the company card and go to the nearest store to buy a new one, while in a large company, you'd be dealing with procurement and five layers of management approvals. A large company looks not quite unlike a government organization.
(Also worth mentioning that absolute efficiency is not a good thing either, when it comes to dealing with people.)
But a government has (self-imposed) financial constraints as well.
Besides, if you decide mostly or only based on financial constraints and not based on reason and good ideas then you should not be in the position to decide what to do.
Resources might be wasted on purpose to avoid tighter financial constraints in the next year that takes into account the spending of the current year.
If Microsoft loses $33 billion per year for ten years (equivalent to ~1/3 of sales), it will go bankrupt. In fact, if it loses money like that for just four years, it will likely go bankrupt.
If the US Government bleeds $1 trillion per year for ten years (equivalent to ~1/3 of its tax revenue), it will tax you more and or print away some of your standard of living. See: Japan's budget deficit versus tax revenue the last decade. Nothing stopped the Japanese Government from being fiscally wildly irresponsible, then debasing the Yen and stealing the standard of living of the Japanese people to pay for it all (still continuing now).
The need to not lose money perpetually, enforces at worst a minimum required level of efficiency by the vast majority of private businesses. There are very few exceptions to that, even in quasi protected monopoly situations such as railroads, telecom or airlines.
The US Government has no inherent efficiency enforcement mechanism. As witnessed by the public debt going from $5.6 trillion to $21 trillion in just 17 years or so.
If you want to talk about required efficiency, trying running a manufacturing business with a 6% profit margin, or Walmart with a 2.x% net income margin, or a liquor store or convenience store with a 5% profit margin. You'll instantly learn how brutal and unforgiving the private sphere tends to be versus the more typically spendthrift ways of government.
Most of the time if you think something is that simple, you're leaving something out.
It's a myth that the private sector is inherently more efficient than public sector. You only need to compare healthcare systems across developed countries to find an enormous counterexample.
Government has a different system of accountability than private industry, sometimes it's less efficient, but sometimes it's more efficient. It depends--there's nothing simple about it.
Healthcare is an obvious exception, and religiously fundamentalist capitalists won't admit to that, but the reason is simple. Healthcare has virtually infinite demand, and the demand for more expensive solutions is intense. It is one of the few sectors of the economy where traditional capitalist price optimization algorithms don't function properly. I wish people would admit this and move towards more rational healthcare considerations, but I also wish people would stop using obvious exceptions to argue against rules.
(Healthcare is also an ethical battleground in a sense that many industries never can be. Should a hospital administrator be willing to spend a million dollars to save one life, or should that money go to equipment that could save more lives? The answer seems obvious, but most people react with a sort of justifiable horror at the thought of letting some poor child die so the hospital can buy some new machines.)
Defense and infrastructure are inherently the responsibility of the state. I'm not a small-government libertarian. Market forces should be used here whenever possible (military-industrial complex, etc) but there obviously can't be competing national militaries or competing national highway systems.
Scientific research: maybe, it depends. Innovation is complicated and there's no linear investment-to-payoff in research. People concerned with profit at least are discouraged by the profit motive from dumping huge amounts of money into failed research. At the same time, some critical research isn't market-profitable.
Universal rules definitely exist in the form of things like supply/demand curves. I would rather live in a hardcore capitalist hellhole than in the shambles of a failed society that would result from the alternative. We should be wary of assuming that non-market intervention is necessary, but we shouldn't shy away from acting when that intervention is necessary.
>Universal rules definitely exist in the form of things like supply/demand curves.
There are no universal rules for economics in reality. There are generally useful models, that often fail spectacularly. All the universal rules you can think of depend on simplifications that never actually hold--rational actors, perfect information, perfect competition etc...
>I would rather live in a hardcore capitalist hellhole than in the shambles of a failed society that would result from the alternative.
That really depends on the alternative. USSR?, North Korea?, Cuba?, Feudalism? I can think of some pretty bad failure states for capitalist hellholes.
> We should be wary of assuming that non-market intervention is necessary, but we shouldn't shy away from acting when that intervention is necessary.
> It's a myth that the private sector is inherently more efficient than public sector.
Stating it, doesn't make it so. You've provided zero argument for your position. You haven't even provided a logic basis for your claim.
Healthcare systems across developed nations? Ok. Germany, Japan and Switzerland all have highly successful private segments to their healthcare systems. They're all as efficient, or more efficient, than comparable overwhelmingly public systems such as in France, Britain or Canada.
Your assertion is that profit motive leads to greater efficiency than any of the motives that drive government agencies.
Just because you state it doesn't make it so.
If you're honest with yourself, I think you can come up with some problems where a public agency would be more efficient/effective than a private company.
If government were operating on a profit motive it wouldn't be doing the things it should be doing.
Government should focus on exactly those things where a profit motive doesn't make sense, i.e. areas where maximising total well-being does not correlate with the ability to extract a profit.
EDIT: So efficiency as applied to government services should really be based on very different criteria than profitability. Though to a lesser extent that is also the case for private companies.
There's actually surprisingly little overtime claimed in Korea for all the >40 hour weeks being worked.
The simple answer is that Korea (and Japan) have a cultural norm where showing dedication to your job/company by working long hours is vastly more important for career advancement (or even continued employment!) than the actual work you get done.
The American government workers I meet tend be software developers, or developers who've moved into management. They work at least as hard as private sector workers, usually for less pay, and they really believe in their work (science/biology).
The American meme of the dysfunctional DMV seems almost self-reinforcing. The equivalent offices I use in Denmark or the UK are efficient, they have targets to meet and a good working culture.
Every DMV I've ever been in was fast, helpful, and reliable. I don't understand DMV jokes. This experiences include outrageously underfunded rural towns and the biggest city in our state.
This sounds like a good start but it should really be implemented at the human level by having managers convince their people to go home (with their work in whatever state it is in). Without the blessing of your superiors this situation could backfire and managers might apply more pressure to finish before the Friday shutdown.
What will happen is people will be sitting at their desks playing on their phones or sleeping. Until the governments of Japan and ROK decide to enforce their existing labor laws none of these "clever" solutions (like "premium Friday" in Japan) will change much.
There are various reasons that people may ask to be exempt. Two that most comes to mind are:
1. Explicit or roundabout pressure from the managers
2. Being expected to produce the same outcome despite reduced work time
Both of which seems like a inertia issue with the culture not following the change. That would probably stabilize over time if a actual rule sets in place.
A crucial aspect of this story is that government employees are a coveted job in Korea, with a good benefits and salary and a healthy pension.
There are separate tests that people have to take in order to apply for gov jobs, and the competition rate is usually very high for all of them, clerical, skill-based, or not - from 40:1 to more often 200:1 of an apply/acceptance ratio.
This generally means that the level of skill and aptitude you encounter is very high; the amount of social morale is high also, since a government job is a respected, very healthy middle-class job.
Having just shutdown my laptop at 9:30 PM MST (on my chromebook now) I just realized I work like a South Korean. No one asked me to work like this today. I was literally thinking how I am creating my own work prison and then I saw this article. At least I'm not alone? Ugh.
Please consider working only your alloted hours, as per your contract. It's very unheathly to work beyond 8 hours per day, maybe even 5-6 hours -- consider your health.
Agreed, some days I only do 4-6 so when I do days like this I feel like it balances out. Maybe I should start doing my own time sheets though. Working from home its really hard to tell. As for contract I am salary like most engineers.
If I'm not careful, I work too much. An extra hour and a half every day quickly adds up.
I wrote a tiny Python script that adds an entry to an SQLite database, with aliases 'in' and 'out', which tells me how many hours I've worked each week.
It will make it easier to remember to leave at 15:30 today.
Am I reading this correctly: You're running an agent on your various devices that sends data to their cloud? Application names at minimum, I assume. Website addresses as far as I can tell. If they harvest window titles: Probably file names you open.
By doing more work than contracted you hurt your coworkers and manager. You raise the bar to an unhealthy level, and when your manager asks for more workers, he will be rebuffed with queries as to why most of his workforce isn't as productive/"hard" working as you are.
From my experience living in Korea and the fact that Korea has one of the lowest productivity of all oecd countries, it is half-half.
A lot of the time is actually not "hard-working" but rather drizzling some work.
This is partly because you know it is expected that you stay long hours (and so you stay long hours without being explicitly asked) so you might as well just do your work slowly.
Also it is partly that nobody can work concentrated for such long hours.
And a lot of time is wasted by people not asking when they are stuck with any kind of problem / task (losing ones face / looking incompetent problem).
Can't solve the entire workaholic problem at once, baby steps. Next steps would be to nuke service access after business hours (email, remote desktop, etc).
Both Germany [1] and France [2] passed laws restricting the use of business email after work hours to ensure proper work/life balance.
I really like flexibility. To me that’s the balance. If they set your work hours how do you have balance? For example, dr appointment or meeting kids teacher in the middle of business day. The balance is being able to jump online that evening when you get home, IMO. So I’m always curious about how these mandated work hour things are implemented and enforced. Because if they just shut off the systems at 5pm, then you’re just missing work. That’s not balance.
They asked to be exempt entirely on their own volition, or their managers "politely" asked them to consider sending in an exemption request? And this isn't a question in earnest because I already know the answer.