
Fujitsu announces permanent work-from-home plan - l31g
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53303364
======
cdavid
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.

~~~
chrisseaton
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!

~~~
derefr
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.

~~~
krick
> 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.

~~~
ska
> 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).

------
snarfy
Any Japanese care to chime in on how WFH is accepted culturally? When I worked
for a Japanese tech company I was surprised by how old school they were.
Landlines, business cards, reams of paper, week long meetings about policies,
and this was a software company. WFH was forbidden unless it was an emergency.

~~~
lnsru
Add fax machines and it will be perfect picture of current situation in
Germany.

~~~
typon
How are two of the most advanced manufacturing countries so backwards?

~~~
AdrianB1
It is a pendulum swing: these countries advanced a lot after WW2, then they
believed they found the ideal way and got stuck there. In the meanwhile time
flows linear, other countries were left behind but caught up and moved on.
This way Japan and Germany still work well due to their excellent history, not
recent trends.

~~~
daemin
I would say more like they found a local maxima and stayed there, never going
even slightly less efficient in order to find a higher maxima than the one
they had.

Kind of reminds me of which countries have the fastest/cheapest Internet
access now. The countries that had Internet first tend to have shitty copper
infrastructure and expensive plans, while the newer countries are all up with
the latest fibre infrastructure and fast/cheap plans.

~~~
AdrianB1
I don't think there is a need to go slightly less efficient in order to
improve the current processes; they just got frozen in time and there are many
such examples with companies and countries. Remember Japan is not the first
time doing it, at the end of the shoguns era they were behind the rest of the
world they were more advanced than.

~~~
daemin
There is always a dip in productivity when switching systems as you need to
untrain people from the old and train them in the new system. Then you need to
work out all the bugs and edge cases in the new system.

So even if it will make you far more efficient there will be a temporary
productivity slump as people get adjusted to it.

------
alistairSH
Can Japanese residents comment on how this works WRT office space in the home?
Do people typically have space in their homes to have a proper home office
setup?

My wife and I are both WFH right now, and we had to buy a second desk and
chair and repurpose what was previously our 2nd bedroom. The 3rd bedroom has
always been a home office. If we lived in a downtown apartment, I'm not sure
what we'd do, as we're both in management and spend the majority of the day
teleconferencing.

~~~
cactus2093
I mean FWIW I’m American and your explanation sounds very foreign to me. I’m a
millennial though, so owning a house at all is quite obstacle. Scrounging up a
down payment when even a 2 bedroom apartment is $1-$1.5 million is not the
easiest task. Renting an extra 2 bedrooms to have lying around in case we
suddenly need 2 offices would also cost an extra couple thousand dollars a
month. My wife and I are both working from home from a 1 bedroom apartment
currently.

~~~
hibikir
The US has very localized housing problems. Many tech giants are realizing
that they have to either diversify their locations or enter into a housing
spiral, as there just aren't enough houses for how many people they'd like to
hire.

Once you step out of a small number of markets, the price problem goes away. I
live in a well sized metro in the midwest, and I've worked, from here, for
companies you've heard about. 4 bedrooms in my street, sitting on half an acre
and a decent school district, are $250k. A 1 bedroom apartment would be under
a thousand a month to rent, and that's a modern building with good appliances,
a gym, a pool and gigabit internet. A single person in tech, right out of
school, can easily save enough to get a mortgage in their first year working.

So yes, your situation is very real, but if there was less pressure to be in
Seattle, NY or SF, the housing problems would melt.

~~~
nostrademons
It's more that the price problem follows the workers.

A decade ago, Seattle was cheap. You could get 4/5 BR homes in Kirkland for
$400K. I just checked, and those homes are going for $1.2M now. Similarly, one
of my former Google coworkers moved out to the Boulder office. When I'd
checked on Boulder in the late 00s, you could get nice homes for $250-300K. He
paid about $850K.

Wherever you have highly paid tech workers, you will have highly paid tech
workers bidding up houses. You just have to get ahead of them, and buy where
the FAANG offices are just being constructed rather than wait until you work
there. True remote work (where you could dial in from anywhere, not just a
city near an office) would fix this, but that's not really what's being
offered these days, and when it is the salaries are more inline with what
people make in the Midwest than what they make in Silicon Valley.

------
ericmcer
The one big downside I have noticed from WFH is that any efficiency I
introduce in my own work becomes reclaimed time. If I can crank through a days
work in 4 hours in the morning I can reasonably take it easy in the afternoon.
This is great but it has created some stress around things like code reviews
and impromptu mentoring etc.

If I am sitting in the office I may as well spend 20 minutes on a code review
trying to figure out a cleaner solution, but at home its harder to do it.
There is just a general feeling of racing towards that 'done' status which
represents a good amount of completed work for the day. Before it was just 9-5
and a thorough code review was a welcome use of that time.

~~~
josh_carterPDX
I think it's even more difficult when you factor in kids at home. We've had to
deal with that at our home which means our ability to get work done has been
cut in half. It also puts a lot of burden on co-workers. The biggest issue
with this has been people without kids wondering why coworkers WITH kids
aren't getting as much done.

~~~
bbojan
But once the situation with the coronavirus is over, the kids will be in
school/daycare, so this won't be an issue.

~~~
josh_carterPDX
Unless you have year round school, this will always be an issue.

------
thesumofall
Not commenting on this specific case here, but I believe we currently see the
pendulum swinging from one extreme (WFH only at a very exclusive subset of
companies) to the other extreme ("WFH first" policies)

I'm convinced the true winners will be those companies that find a smart mix
of both worlds. This includes recognizing that both concepts have their
strengths (e.g., people are a lot more disciplined about meetings in a remote
context) and weaknesses (e.g., a further breakdown of the separation between
work and live). WFH needs more than just giving people the green light to work
from home on selected days. It also, for example, needs a radical rethink of
office infrastructure (most offices are not designed for 10 people sitting
side-by-side and being on the phone most of the day), management culture, and
shared best practices how to approach non-transactional work (e.g., how to
tackle complex topics with people who do not know each other remotely?)

~~~
buboard
There is no middle ground -- WFH is self-reinforcing trend, because offices
are much less useful when they are half-empty and all processes have go
online. As soon as some coworkers move, others follow. If people start working
2-3 days at home ... they start to think about moving somewhere better. I
wonder what is the endgame of this rearrangement? Perhaps nomadism will become
common? But in that case, cities will lose even more cohesion than they ve
lost so far. If we take away the work factor, the question "where do i/my
family live" becomes much more open-ended. Obvious choice #1 is near extended
family. What else motivates people to move?

~~~
munificent
I don't think it's anywhere near as bimodal as you say.

As far as human pyschology goes, I think it's hard to be productive over the
very long term with almost no real in-person time to connect with your team.
We're social animals and we bond best when together. And we are more
productive and efficient when we have bonded in that way.

Even famously all-remote companies shell out cash to fly everyone together at
least a few times a year because of this. At some point, though, there are
diminishing returns to getting everyone in the same room. The optimum point
surely varies from person to person and depends on the nature of their work,
but I don't think the peak is "every day" or "never".

Yes, offices are less useful when they're empty half the time. But homes are
too! Most American homes sit empty from 8am-6pm every single day. Miles and
miles of dead suburban streets, empty driveways, houses silent except for the
ticking of thermostats.

I'm interested to see a company try a middle ground like this: Everyone works
from home most days. At some periodic interval, maybe once a week, everyone
comes to some shared space for meeting and coordination work.

This sounds like the worst of both worlds because you need both home office
space and office space. But the office space can likely be shared with several
teams. An office big enough for 100 people could service a 1,000 if teams only
came in once every two weeks. If in-person days are mostly around meetings and
communication, you don't need a lot of dedicated desk space. It doesn't need
to feel like a permanent "territory" for each worker. Instead, just a pile of
shared meeting rooms and open spaces.

If you still have to come in a few times, then it sounds like you're still
stuck living close to an urban center. But, actually, the livable radius
increases dramatically. A one-hour each way commute is a nightmare if you do
it every day. That's ten hours a week stuck in a car. But if you only come in
once every two weeks, then you could cut your total commute time in half while
living five _times_ as far away. And, since in-person days are mostly for
meeting anyway, it's viable to have an understanding that commuting is part of
your "work day" and have a shorter in-person work day.

In return, you get to spend less time commuting and more time in your own
community, with your pets, with your loved ones, and in your own home.

~~~
ghaff
>almost no real in-person time to connect with your team

I work on a very distributed team and, in normal times, we just physically get
together in one of our offices or in conjunction with some event a lot of
people are attending anyway a few times a year. Most of us (normally) travel a
good part of the time anyway so it's really not especially disruptive.

I actually agree that remote teams should have some real F2F time but that
needn't mean living within commuting distance of a common office.

------
zkid18
Wow, that huge for Japan I believe. I live at Kichijoji and it takes me 1 hour
to get to work in Akasaka. I love my place and somehow get used to this
routine, but honestly I wish I could rent a place in Japanese countryside.

~~~
kubatyszko
You can actually get a house for free in some areas, mostly central Japan.
Many cities are becoming deserted and houses are left alone, governments offer
incentives to take them over. Might come with a catch such as committing to
maintenance of farming.

~~~
y-c-o-m-b
My wife did a little light reading on this subject and found it's more
complicated than that. It turns out that finding the owner of these properties
is an enormous challenge because due to the high level of taxes and fees
associated with these buildings, the owners are reluctant to claim them (to
avoid paying the taxes/fees). I would like to see someone living in Japan
confirm this, though.

~~~
freetime2
I haven't seen any houses being offered for free in my area, but have seen
number that were listed at less than $15K USD and wouldn't consider any of
them livable without at least some major renovation - and in most cases you'd
probably want to just demolish the house completely and build something new.
Of course different people might have differing definitions of what is
"livable", so your mileage may vary.

Focusing on the abandoned houses is a bit of a red herring, though. There is
definitely affordable non-free housing to be found in Japan... less than $100K
USD for a move-in ready house in a small city seems very doable to me.

------
runawaybottle
I’d love to see companies convert ‘Unlimited vacation time at your discretion’
over to ‘Unlimited remote at your discretion’.

~~~
xtracto
"Unlimited vacation" is a deception. Real perks are to have 15 or 20 days of
vacations, increasing with seniority at the company, and _forced_ vacations
(i.e., the company forces you to take the vacations every year). It is also
good for the company health (ensure that no 1 person missing has a large
impact).

~~~
wontonzealot
_" Unlimited vacation" is a deception._

I see this being repeated over and over but I can't help but think that it's
become a way to discourage giving employees time off from a company's
perspective. I've successfully taken 30+ days off in an unlimited vacation
environment (not consecutively) and not been reprimanded in any way because I
was able to operate responsibly. Before I left for any length of vacation, I
made sure that projects were delivered and successfully launched weeks before
hand and I created documentation and trained others on continuing work
processes (the lack of my presences should not have ANY impact).

"Unlimited vacation" should be a work perk that is attractive. Often times I
find that it's the managers who don't believe employees should be given time
off or the company decides to just implement unlimited vacation without any
process in place to revoke the privilege or guidelines as to what a
responsible policy looks like. It's easy to say something doesn't work when
there was never any intention or effort to make it work.

Just my 2 cents.

~~~
ghaff
I had a fairly long conversation last year with someone who is a manager at a
well-known "unlimited vacation" company. His take was that it works well but
that's because there's clear leading by example from the top.

(It's also not necessarily a great system in general if you're someone who
moves between jobs a lot as there's no unused vacation payout under such a
system.)

------
helen___keller
Considering how Japanese companies are famously conservative, I can't help but
wonder if Fujitsu executives were faced with undeniable evidence that
productivity increased during the pandemic WFH

------
poma88
Finally someone had the brains to do it! Beautiful.. if they pay for the use
of space and resources at home

------
SenHeng
Another side often missing in these dicussions is that Japan's tax laws are
relatively sane and are the same through all states. You will not be taxed
differently just because you're living in a different state or are living
between states.

There are some issues regarding where your residence tax should be paid to but
those are minor compared to what I've read on here about crossing state lines
in the US.

------
mleonhard
> The company also said the programme would allow staff to choose where they
> worked, whether that was from home, a major corporate hub or a satellite
> office.

Culture cannot change quickly. I expect only a few Fujitsu employees will work
from home. Most will continue to waste countless hours sitting at a desk to
"demonstrate commitment to the company." It won't matter that the desk is in a
satellite office. Male managers will require their female subordinates to work
from the same satellite office with them. Only determined top leadership can
change a Japanese company's time-wasting sexist culture. I doubt Fujitsu will
succeed before the pandemic ends.

------
AlexTWithBeard
But if software engineers can work from home, they surely can work from
Mumbai?

~~~
alkonaut
If they speak japanese and are happy to adjust their working day to the
japanese timezone I can't see why not.

------
dcow
Is productivity going up, or are workers more happy, or both?

~~~
murgindrag
I think it depends on the company and on the team.

In my company, my productivity skyrocketed, while that of my work colleagues
crashed. It largely correlated with things like tech literacy and being open
to change. Where I work, there are a few people with who invested in nice WFH
setups, work-life integration, and all the things needed to make this work,
who found productivity going up. And then there is the majority of people who
stubbornly still refuse to even use a headset or learn to use tech, and are
just waiting for the office to reopen.

Outside my company, it's not quite the same split, but most people are dipping
their toes in rather than diving headfirst.

~~~
CubsFan1060
I'm curious, what all do you include when you think about a "nice WFH setup"?
For me it's largely a defined space, a nice desk, a nice chair, and a nice
monitor. Anything else on your list?

~~~
giancarlostoro
High quality microphone and headphones so you dont echo. I already bought a
Blue Yeti microphone ages ago but it works wonders when I have to hop on a
call.

As for nice chair depending on your employer I would ask for the one from your
job if its sufficient. I was able to take mine home. Its just gonna collect
dust otherwise.

~~~
adwww
My UK employer has closed the office and tried to sell us our own redundant
desk chairs...

~~~
giancarlostoro
That is awful, my employer actually gave out some of our "old" desk chairs, so
I took one with an arm missing, I don't use the arm rest, so I took out the
spare arm, otherwise if I had asked for my actual desk chair I'm sure they
would of given it to me to use. We're technically allowed in the office due to
the type of work we do (defense contracts) but mostly work remote, I have only
heard of a few people going to the office for anything they need. It's sad
when companies don't treat you like adults.

------
john4534243
Even software service companies have started to go full remote. WFH is the
future.

~~~
dtech
"Even"? softare dev is one of the easiests things to do remotely

~~~
achow
"Even" because the comment is about software service companies (as opposed to
software product ones).

In service companies keeping or accounting time (so that clients can be
billed) is a thing.

When working from home, keeping account of time spent may be a challenge. As
long as one is in office, even though they may not be clacking away on a
keyboard (but goofing away) they can be billed without any guilt and if the
service company is really questioned or audited, they can show employee swipe
in and out time.

For WFH employees one cannot, also just tracking login maynot cover full story
(Ex. tele calls would not be accounted for).

------
saos
Thats really good. I wonder how UK companies will respond.

~~~
noir_lord
They largely won't unless forced to.

Management in the UK by and large sucks.

~~~
Accacin
I always wonder how people come up with these statements, is it just
anecdotal?

To add my own, my company was shifting to working remotely for the development
team gradually, but now our CEO has been impressed with how well we adapted to
working from home and has told us that our office will not be open until
September at the earliest.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
From CEO perspective they shift all accommodation [overhead] costs to
employees with no increase in wages. Even with slightly lower productivity
then financially surely wfh for dev roles and the like is going to get them a
bigger bonus and/or more profit.

Sure it might just be cleaning/utility costs/stationary for now, but longer
term expansion won't have stepped accommodation costs. And if locations can be
done away with ...

I can't see why workers would be happy without higher wages? I want at least
to afford a house big enough to have an office space (I'm working out of my
bedroom, my line-manager is in their kids bedroom, their line-manager is in a
utility room (storage and laundry room)). 5-10% increase in wages should do
it.

~~~
Accacin
I completely understand this, but I've seen more people complain that their
company (in the UK mostly) is not letting them work from home, or did and are
now demanding that people go back into the office.

I personally agree with you, we should be paid more now that we're not
commuting but I doubt that will happen. Our company are organising a one-off
payment to help people set up their home office though, which is a nice
gesture.

------
georgex7
All companies remote work policies: remote.lifeshack.io

------
onetimemanytime
Covid might actually result in permanent changes. Sucks for a lot of
commercial real estate companies. WeWork is probably 100% done

~~~
CubsFan1060
I also wonder the impact it'll have on retail and lunch places. A lot of small
restaurants popped up around places with a lot of office workers. If those
office workers are all WFH now, the previously desirable restaurant locations
will become semi-worthless.

On top of that, my guess is that WFH people will go out for lunch less often,
so those restaurants won't just relocate to more residential areas, they (and
their jobs), will just disappear.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
OTOH, isn't it pretty customary for any large office (let's say 1k+) to have a
cafeteria, with presumably most employees eating there?

Some of these will not want to cook lunch in the middle of work, and at least
order takeout instead.

~~~
bpicolo
> with presumably most employees eating there

I think this is a pretty big/new tech specific thing, and there are still
exemptions. Of the large non-tech companies in NYC, I know a few banks have
cafeterias, but the food is both not free and not good

~~~
claudeganon
In Japan, it’s far more common, even for much smaller companies. There’s a
great Japanese TV show that does mini documentaries on these places (and
others where workers eat) called, “Sara Meshi” (サラメシ)

[https://www.nhk.jp/p/salameshi/ts/PVPP6PZNLG/](https://www.nhk.jp/p/salameshi/ts/PVPP6PZNLG/)

------
njerschow
Hey, you should add your company here: remote.lifeshack.io !

