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
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.