Closely related to the need to walk the Genba, this key principle suggests that to truly understand a situation you need to visit in person. The Toyota Production System requires a high level of management presence on the factory floor
From personal observation this is very true, Japan has a great and unpretentious grey collar culture. There's a way in which all work is seen as equally essential and managers aren't above anyone else. Not just at Toyota, but even waiters in restaurants are treated like this, I think it shows in how negatively tipping is seen in Japan.
It's also a culture that exists here in Germany in Mittelstand companies, although sadly less and less in large firms where management culture from the Anglosphere seems to have gained popularity over the last 20-30 years. American management always reminds me of the historical British army, where the gentry directly was recruited into the higher ranks American management and workers seem equally stratified.
>It's also a culture that exists here in Germany in Mittelstand companies
As a tech worker in Germany I've worked in 2 different established Mittlestand companies(not startups) that are pretty much world leaders in their niche and I promised myself I would never do that again.
Their company culture was terrible and while they kept preaching things like "we're like a family here and we're all equal" that was just a facade. Nepotism was rampant in both cases, with most employees being either related or close friends of the CEO and upper management, both coming from old-money families, generating a strong tribal behavior, so anyone who wasn't your boss could get you in trouble if they decided they don't like you and raises and promotions were allocated based purely on the tribe's perception of you and performance judged on butt time in your chair rather than results. As a foreign tech worker there who's not part of the tribe you're treated with an air of "you should just be grateful we gave you a job" even though they kept whining about not being able to attract new talent and grow. The lack of transparency was prominent with the CEO always preaching how "times are tight and we're all in this together" to justify lack of wage increases while he bought more vacation homes abroad and exotic cars. Information about the company's projects, customers, sales, revenue was all kept away from the employees who were not part of the tribal circles as it only circulated via spoken words.
Now I only work for big corps and it's been a huge improvement, with American corps in Germany treating you the best. They're transparent about their projects, customers and earnings in their quarterly town meetings, information is communicated electronically, not by speak, leadership and and workers are (mostly) hired and promoted based on merit and transparent goals and processes vs straight up nepotism and tribalism.
This is exact my experience working for German Mittelstand. There are patriarch, family and their slaves. As a foreigner one ends up in the slave group. While cutting your salary because of difficult economic situation patriarch orders a new Mercedes. That was so surreal.
I wasn’t that lucky with American company. I ended up in one with American brand on the building and rotten hostile culture inside. Local patriarch is hostile towards Americans and the family insults new American owners on every occasion. Luckily I am leaving this show in 7 months for my own startup experiment.
You simply worked for a shitty German company and a great American one.
I worked for quite a few young(!) small- to medium-sized tech companies in Germany, and most were like GP describes - unpretentions, genuinely down-to-earth management.
Of course, the opposite also exists, especially with old-school managers in well-established companies. Family-owned businesses are often the worst. The butt-in-seat mentality is very prevalent. During the Corona pandemic, they had to be dragged into the 20th century, kicking and screaming.
I don't think generalizations can be made in either direction.
>You simply worked for a shitty German company and a great American one.
I worked for two shitty German companies that, ironically, are well reviewed on Kununu and well respected in the tech field (hardware engineering). I also interviewed at many more established Mittlestand tech(hardware) companies and I saw the same shitty patterns(butts in seats culture, micromanagement, no work from home allowed, outdated tech, poor pay, "flat culture and family atmosphere") so I feel safe to generalize at this point.
>I worked for quite a few young(!) small- to medium-sized tech companies in Germany
Well the ones I worked at were part of established hardware tech Mittlestand that keeps getting positively exemplified as why Germany is so successful vs other countries, not the hip new software startup.
>Of course, the opposite also exists, especially with old-school managers in well-established companies. Family-owned businesses are often the worst. The butt-in-seat mentality is very prevalent. During the Corona pandemic, they had to be dragged into the 20th century, kicking and screaming.
Well, yes, that's exactly my experience. The experience made me give up for good on ever working for the Mittlestand business, especially the family owned ones.
Out of curiosity, in which city are you located and wich field of tech are you in? I'm open for moving once covid blows over and scouting for spots already.
>Japan has a great and unpretentious grey collar culture.
but I disagree on:
>There's a way in which all work is seen as equally essential and managers aren't above anyone else.
The latter I've seen to not hold true at all, and this assessment can be derived with equal weight from the very "top down, respect your seniors" culture of Japan that you're taught as early as elementary school over and over again.
I've seen this go in to effect so bad that clueless managers that are by no means an expert, overrides expert assessment, and people including the expert reluctantly budge to the pressure of "your boss/manager is always right".
The more realistic take would be "all work is seen as inherently valuable and should be taken seriously" to be the general mantra in the Japanese society, often associated with ikigai [0].
This societal pressure of "finding ikigai in your work, and strive for perfection" combined by "respect(unconditionally) the decision of the elder/boss" is probably an contributing factor to why Japans "Job satisfaction" level is around 42% [1]
Quote from [1]:
"Only 42 percent of Japanese said they were satisfied with their work and, to add insult to injury, 21 percent said they were dissatisfied, both the lowest and the highest outcomes in the survey, respectively."
I’ve heard this as well. Both from westerners who worked in software in Japan and from Japanese people (all men) who worked in software in Japan. I also work with someone who worked in design in Japan for 7 years, who has been a great insight into the working culture there.
Can anyone elaborate or clarify why software developers might not be valued in Japan? I recall one person on HN explaining it as a problem of the market being saturated and software not being as huge of a market as it is in the USA. I can’t speak to that, though.
Ironically, based on the original comment, the issue is that East Asian countries (like Germany, which was the archetype industrialisation model for East Asia) are largely run economically for the benefit of large corporations. So developers are hired en masse like every other employee (in particular, skilled labour is hired once after graduation), there is a stigma against switching jobs (even if you could find somewhere to move), employees are essentially interchangeable, and there is almost no innovation.
The original comment is hard to understand. Germany and Japan are two of the absolute worst places on earth to be a consumer/worker in the developed world (the IMF even produced a paper on this in an attempt to put pressure on Germany to improve standards for workers). The US is nowhere close to having a management aristocracy because the system is open. Even in the UK, which has a similar economic model, the low-level of competence among managers is actually a major factor behind weak productivity growth. People just long for systems that aren't like the one they have, low levels of employee turnover are not a panacea, they led to heavily rigid management and are often linked to a high proportion of unproductive, family-owned business that are managed by birthright...professional management is, innately, open. If you look at Denmark, high levels of employee turnover actually lead to higher wages because it creates so much more innovation (most countries that have any other model, including Japan, are trying desperately to get away from it).
Afaik, France is the only country that has the aristocracy model: it is usually literally impossible to be promoted into management if you didn't go to grandes ecoles, and most of the top jobs in govt and business are just rotated through this group of people. Unlike the US, the curriculum of related courses often has no relation to reality, and is designed to be as complex/abtruse as possible so entry to the higher reaches of society can be limited. It is difficult to understate how envied the US system of management is compared to this...it isn't just that the US does this slightly better, it is that the US is at 100, and everyone else is at 10. It isn't close.
> So developers are hired en masse like every other employee (in particular, skilled labour is hired once after graduation), there is a stigma against switching jobs (even if you could find somewhere to move), employees are essentially interchangeable, and there is almost no innovation.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I worked with German multinationals for about a decade, and I saw quite a bit of this type of behavior from their management.
Japan is often said that here's best place to live but worst place to work. This is reasonable because harder work makes inexpensive and useful services (example: restaurant). Is Germany worse for both?
I’m curious, which part of 36hrs/wk work, a legal cap at 40hrs/wk, 6 wks of vacation, 2 yrs of parental leave, socialized health care, college (essentially) for free, etc, is the most horrendous part for you about being a worker in Germany? Which makes it “the absolute worst place on earth“?
The legal cap is 48hrs/week, max 10hrs/d. Parental leave is 12-14 months and you get around 67% of your average net income. When you look at vacation you have to take public holidays into account and that differs a lot between the states within Germany. Germany has 5 public holidays (which don't fall on a Saturday or Sunday), the USA for example has 9 public holidays this year.
The benefits are largely the result of workers unions. Most benefits were given to prevent a rise of communism. The result were high work standards. But those high standards only apply to some industries which are in decline and some of them have almost disappeared (steel for example).
Germany is almost certainly not the worst place to be a worker. The problem is that Germany is a gerontocracy. Only the elderly part of the workforce fully benefits from them. 30 days paid leave with 38-39hrs/week were normal a few decades ago. Nowadays one should not expect to get more than the bare minimum. In a lot of industries workarounds have become the norm. For example workers in slaughterhouses are hired as contractors so work standards don't need to be applied.
The main issue I have is that the German economy and the idea of the social welfare state is on shaky feet. The baby boomer will retire within the next decade but the German welfare state is based on a pyramid scheme which will collapse soon.
So Germany is a bad place to be worker in that sense that you need to take a gigantic bet on the continuation of a system which is designated to fail on the long run.
I agree with all of this, and certainly with your correction of my sloppy wrong comments (wrong numbers).
Further, what you sketch out in the second part is exactly my biggest squabble with Germany. Let's see how a society that lives off of exporting machines fares in the future after fighting innovation and entrepreneurship for two generations now.
That said, I still don't see even in the slightest how these are "the worst working conditions on earth".
> correction of my sloppy wrong comments (wrong numbers).
It was not completely wrong. Being an employee gives you those benefits (eg you can stretch parental leave to 2yrs with part time work, the minimum vacation is 24 days instead of 30, but there's unlimited sick leave), and it is incomparable to the ridiculous PTO/PSL system in the US.
However, companies by and large only do this due to external pressure (govt, unions, competition), not any kind of inherent cultural benevolence.
In tech/engineering, this typically means that instead of direct hiring, hiring through agencies where people are regularly rotated out of projects to not have to become permanent employees, and without the regular benefits of the host company. Freelance tech work is actually becoming rare because German law has Duck Typing for determining employment status, so if you're de facto salaried, and the govt finds out, both the employer and employee suddenly owe all the relevant employment taxes, even years back, and because this has been abused and has been cracked down on, nowadays getting freelance work is difficult.
Of course, that somehow didn't stop companies from trying to pull the same scam with "gig economy" BS on the lowest paid workers the past few years.
It is easy to win at exporting if you pay employees in a functionally worthless currency. Germany's trade surplus is 10% of GDP, this is roughly where China was at peak. Germany can win at exporting because: consumers are conservative and will accept large corporations milking them, and other countries in Europe are willing to let Germany export deflation to them.
It is one of the most unsustainable economic models (and the source of significant global financial instability...China's trade surplus peaked in 2008, not a coincidence) and that is before you consider the need going forward for high levels of innovation, business creation, etc.
I didn't say on earth: I managed that section, I said in the developed world. If you provide a counter-example then I will accept you are correct.
I believe the same is pretty much true for The Netherlands, which might not be a surprise.
The pensions in The Netherlands might actually be better arranged for now, but it's likely at some point that the EU will (indirectly) try to gain control over Dutch pension funds (e.g. by forcing these funds to allocate a certain percentage of spending to buy Italian bonds).
Health care isn't socialised, it is a mixed-system (almost nowhere has a "socialised" system...even the UK, the most effective systems are mixed like the US system...Germany, in particular, is known for having fly-by-night private doctors who will do all kinds of crazy shit if you give them enough money, it is one of the only places in Europe where you can get stem-cell therapy for example...it is a very odd system). I am not sure what you mean by "legal" cap, if you want to work more or less hours you can. Other similar countries do not employ slave labour. And education is very cheap in the US (cheaper than most countries in Europe) if you go to a state college...at private universities, the fees in Germany are still very expensive (the US has better colleges, so private colleges in the US are always going to be higher than everywhere else)...you aren't comparing like to like.
And presumably, you don't come from Germany because all the reasons why it is bad are reasons that wouldn't occur to most people who don't live in that system: unions that are essentially non-functional/run by companies, staggeringly low levels of consumption relative to income (Germany runs a trade surplus worth 10% of GDP, which is all funded by savings...this is as high as China when China was at peak inequality), the average wealth of German citizens is equal to Greece...an economy that isn't functioning and doesn't have the large number of billionaires that Germany has (who largely got rich in the 30s), non-existent levels of competition, non-existent levels of innovation, closed banking system that pays nothing to savers and funnels free money to bankers/large corporations who have (historically) lost it all in short order, sometimes shockingly low wages (I believe this has changed but German apprentince wages were sometimes 2 or 3 euros/hour). Again though, read about German history (or even Northern European countries, generally bar the UK)...the economic system was designed by large corporations, that is who it is for. It isn't for consumers (or google "IMF Germany report"...if you don't believe me).
> Health care isn't socialised, it is a mixed-system (almost nowhere has a "socialised" system...even the UK,
> the most effective systems are mixed like the US system...Germany, in particular, is known for having fly-by-night
> private doctors who will do all kinds of crazy shit if you give them enough money
I think that's missing the point a little bit - when we talk about the UK and Germany having "socialised" healthcare this usually refers to the fact that it's not primarily provided by a mishmash of private insurers and private hospitals run as businesses for profit, but by the state as a service for the populace. It doesn't mean that there's not also a small private healthcare market for the wealthy to get quicker treatment in fancier facilities or to get unusual or elective procedures. One side effect of this is that there’s basically no anxiety about losing your access to healthcare if you lose your job or choose to quit - it’s just not part of the equation. This is the main point being made here. Oh and I think we should be very careful using the words "effective" and "US system" so close together in a sentence when talking about healthcare :-)
There are interesting examples of countries who have "mixed" systems though - Netherlands (where the healthcare company I work for are based) and Czech Republic (where I live) both have a sort of hybrid system of a market of health insurance companies in tandem with govt funding. And while ČR's isn't particularly spectacular, NL is very highly regarded worldwide. Frankly I'm a little surprised that those who are against M4A or single-payer don't ever cite it. Could be because the government still contribute more than the private insurers.
I have no idea what you mean...Germany is the European version of the US healthcare system. It is very high-cost, the private sector is not small at all, and it isn't only used by the wealthy. Again, German doctors are kind of notorious.
The reason why people don't mention NL is because it doesn't fit anyone's narrative. In the US, they have a mixed public/private system with a large private sector so their solution is: someone else should pay for my healthcare. Mixed systems are less attractive because, to a large extent, that is what the US has already (the US is exceptional because of the administration/ancillary costs in their system, not the structure). I agree though, NL is very good. The results are pretty average but it is very well optimised overall. I am from the UK, and healthcare is unbelivably bad because it is so ideological...that is definitely the wrong road.
that's one way to paint a picture - with facts, actually. However, as parent said: There's another picture. Mandated 20 days/year holidays (in big companies it's often 30 days), overtime has to be paid (these are things that came to pass due to pressure from unions!), healthcare for everyone, rent prices that are not horrendous (and a lot of social housing), a taxation system that is friendly to people with low income, unemployment benefits, minimum wage (9€/h) etc. There's a reason so many people look up to Germany, even in Europe. Your opinion is definitely more fringe. btw. I'm German.
>overtime has to be paid (these are things that came to pass due to pressure from unions!)
Not all jobs in Germany are unionized and many modern contracts have optional overtime hours built in them to prevent the employer from having to pay up for crunchtime.
I did not define what I meant by socialized health care, but I meant it in a positive way. Everyone is insured, and your insurance is not bound to any employer. Ironically, this means there is some actual competition in Germany (or at least more so than in the US where you can choose between the cheap and the expensive option your employer signed up for.)
No, you cannot work as an employee for as long as you want. My numbers were wrong, but it's a 10hr cap per day, and 48hr cap per week, as written in another comment. In its default, beyond that, your boss is personally responsible for this.
I am sure all you write about he financial system is true, but the thing is that compared to the US you can get away with much less savings and liquidity, and you get a much higher standard of living for a lot less money. Compare rent, cell phone, internet, health insurance, and you get a lot more for a lot less in Germany. With your health insurance not tied to an employer, you also don't run the risk of losing it when losing your job - e.g. in case of severe sickness, when you need insurance most. You don't need to save up for college of your kids, and can just send them to a public school.
36h/week in not the norm in Germany. Most my friends working there have 40h contracts and some have optional overtime included in the contract to cover crunch time.
I've picked this up through consulting work. There are several large Japanese companies that located to this area about 30 years ago, and a few Japanese suppliers have sprung up around them. In dealing with them on side jobs and through friends, it's become very apparent that they are FAR less willing to spend money on IT than American companies. (One supplier, doing many millions of dollars a year in sales, is still running their company on Excel spreadsheets.) Which is a shame, because, from what I've seen, they're so far behind, they're smack-dab in the middle of the biggest-bang-for-buck area of the IT spending curve.
> American management always reminds me of the historical British army, where the gentry directly was recruited into the higher ranks American management and workers seem equally stratified.
As a veteran, American management seemed to take straight from the American military management. I always assumed it was an artifact of WW-II management theories and the subsequent post-war academic funding boom.
Nope. American management was created in the late 19th century with railroads.
In fact, management didn't exist before the US invented it. Most large companies in the UK were run by people who had no interest in management. They bought a factory then promised a piece rate to a labour gangmaster (this is an abtruse point but wage labour wasn't really a thing until the 20th century, the model was proto-industrial "business" structures which paid by output...wages shift risk to employers, and so that took time to develop). In Germany and much of Northern Europe, there was a very well-defined capitalist and worker class who negotiated through govt (because the capitalists mostly owned the govt and got their money to build stuff from state-owned banks, most unions ended up being allied to those capitalists/govt because revolution was taken quite seriously...left-wing unions didn't really exist). Again, there was no real concept of professional management...you negotiated with workers en masse, there was total seperation (and there is still is in Northern Europe, to a large extent...most billionaires in Germany got rich in the 30s, for reasons best forgotten, and have just passed it down unchanged which is why wealth inequality is so high).
So it was with the railroads that actual professional managers started appearing (railroads were undoubtedly a new kind of complexity but US ones were run far more professionally), and shortly after this that you see management training and the like. The US was, and still is to a large extent, one of the only places where you see universities actually relate to the real world i.e. you have universities teaching practical tasks like management (I am in the UK, management is still thought of as a "joke" subject by most academics...stuff like Classics and Politics is far more respectable than business, people who need to work for money are looked down upon as hopelessly gauche...it is kind of funny that people believe the opposite is true, but that isn't self-evident if you come from a society where practical knowledge is valued).
Btw, the defining book on this is Alfred Chandler's Visible Hand. He is probably the greatest historian of business (yep, he is from the US which is the only place where historians actually study this kind of thing en masse).
>most billionaires in Germany got rich in the 30s, for reasons best forgotten, and have just passed it down unchanged which is why wealth inequality is so high).
This is the truth so I don't get why you're bering downvoted.
I remember seeing some study that showed much less social mobility in Europe compared to the USA. Many families in Europe that were wealthy hundreds of years ago are still wealthy to this day, whereas in the USA one (used to?) see much more transition of wealth.
Perhaps in this sense, Europe is much more unequal than the USA.
Yes, there are families in Florence, England and other European countries and cities who have enjoyed unbroken dynastic wealth over several hundreds of years. But this doesn't prove that Europe is more or less equal than the US. The US has only existed for ~2 centuries. In 1870 the US surpassed the UK to become the world's largest economy, and remains so. So there's only been 2 centuries or less for dynastic wealth to form in the US, as opposed to ~10 centuries in Europe.
Yep, that is correct...although something of an inevitably given the different historical paths (and isn't true of all countries within Europe either). But what I would add is that downward mobility is just as important as upward mobility: the US is, I think, unique in that rich people can move downwards which doesn't happen in other places.
Btw, neither approach is more optimal than the other. There are trade-offs. What some countries in Europe get wrong is that they are trading off innovation which is going to become more important for growth going forward.
>the US is, I think, unique in that rich people can move downwards which doesn't happen in other places.
Which IMHO is very healthy since it creates space for the younger players to move up vs having a reign of feudalistic families owning most vital sectors of the economy for decades or even hundreds of years.
The entire concept of social mobility being easier in the US is false, and has been for decades. The idea that downward mobility is unique to the US is also distinctly false - not only does it exist in other countries, it is more common in many places than it is in the US.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/these-are-the-10-coun...
Thanks for the insightful and well written comment, however I wonder if (and propose that) both can be true: your statements regarding the initial seed of business management from western railroads and also post WWII military influence on mid 1900s business management practices.
No, the influence was actually the reverse. Very briefly: railroads, oil/telecom companies, car/retail companies then WW2 then govt begins to try and pull management from companies into the military.
This is the military-industrial complex of Eisenhower. Companies were integrated into the military during WW2, and their influence was maintained after: management practices from companies into the military. Kennedy's govt was full of people from business making foreign policy/military decisions (with unfortunate consequences). Again, it is difficult to understate how far ahead the US was with management training so it is natural that this innovation spread into the military.
To the contrary, the managerial class of hired administrators who did not themselves own the business was a product of the industrial revolution. MBA programs sprung up because the huge new corporations (steel, oil, etc) needed a steady supply of people to fill this role.
At least that's what I remember from Rakesh Khurana's book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.
From personal observation this is very true, Japan has a great and unpretentious grey collar culture. There's a way in which all work is seen as equally essential and managers aren't above anyone else. Not just at Toyota, but even waiters in restaurants are treated like this, I think it shows in how negatively tipping is seen in Japan.
It's also a culture that exists here in Germany in Mittelstand companies, although sadly less and less in large firms where management culture from the Anglosphere seems to have gained popularity over the last 20-30 years. American management always reminds me of the historical British army, where the gentry directly was recruited into the higher ranks American management and workers seem equally stratified.