
South Korean government to shut off computers to stop its employees working late - Mononokay
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43497017
======
fiblye
>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.

~~~
mikekchar
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.

~~~
fiblye
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.

~~~
mikekchar
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.

~~~
yrsong
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.

------
phyller
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.

~~~
exotree
I’ve increasingly found the characterization that most government employees
are lazy or inefficient to be remarkably untrue.

~~~
jaggederest
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.

~~~
throwawaybq8
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.)

~~~
gepi79
I agree.

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.

------
chrsstrm
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.

~~~
rangibaby
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.

------
maruhan2
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.

------
brenschluss
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.

------
systematical
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.

~~~
movedx
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.

~~~
systematical
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.

~~~
smt88
Check out RescueTime

~~~
darklajid
I assume you're familiar with that product?

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.

Are you comfortable with that?

~~~
smt88
I don't use it, but it doesn't seem significantly riskier than using cloud-
based email or any other proprietary desktop software.

------
afterburner
Are these people working overtime all working or putting in face time?

~~~
zenir
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).

------
hprotagonist
More precisely, this appears to be for governmental employees only.

------
lokopodium
What about those who work late away from computers?

~~~
toomuchtodo
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.

[1]
[https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/12/01/366806938/...](https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/12/01/366806938/german-
government-may-say-nein-to-work-emails-after-six)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/world/europe/france-
work-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/world/europe/france-work-
email.html)

~~~
conductr
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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Or just start fresh in the morning.

There are reasons these regulations are being enacted. Reducing abusive
workplace environments takes priority over flexibility and convenience.

------
Lanz
Government workers working hard?! Must be a nice problem to have.

