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Japan's NTT to begin remote work as norm for 30k employees
- lettergram 4y agoI’m sure that’ll help the already high levels of chronic loneliness in Japan…
- midasuni 4y agoClearly office work doesn’t help with this. Perhaps the flexibility and the removal of the need for things like capsule hotels will help. Maybe towns outside of the large megacities will see a renaissance ad people under 65 will be living there.
- lettergram 4y agoAs someone who did just that (went remote, moved to a small town with a Bay Area salary). I can say it’s amazing and highly recommend. That said, no one else I know chose it. You lose a lot of the city night life and niche things. Instead you gain space, more rural style hobbies, less diverse food (particularly if you eat out), etc. A lot of people aren’t able to recognize the pros / cons of such a trade. For anyone reading, I recommend living in a suburban / rural location. Get out and take care of a big garden, go to local events and join a few clubs. Definitely a positive experience.
- filoleg 4y agoHow long ago did you make that switch? Asking because with things like that, there is always an amazing honeymoon period, but reality settles in a few years down the road. Not just talking about the urban=>rural switch specifically, but in the opposite direction as well, and when it comes to pretty much any major change of a similar nature in general.
- pengaru 4y ago> less diverse food (particularly if you eat out) After spending a few years in a very rural part of CA while rebuilding my cabin, the lack of quality diverse organic produce I'd taken for granted in SF Bay area grocers is one of the biggest complaints I have. I haven't seen a Pomelo in a store for over 4 years now, let alone an organic one.
- quantumwannabe 4y agoYou can buy exotic produce online these days, so you can mitigate that if you know what you want.
- ghaff 4y agoI live about an hour outside a major Northeast city in an ex-urban/semi-rural location. (It's not really rural but I'm one of three houses on about 100+ acres of land and can't really see my neighbors at this time of year.) I find it's a decent compromise. I have space. I can take walks in the woods or easily drive to small mountain hikes. But I'm only about an hour to go in for live theater, a meal, etc. And there's nothing keeping me from going into town for a weekend if I wanted to.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- slimsag 4y agoThat's seems a quite naive/brash take. Isn't it the case that Japanese work culture, "stay until the boss leaves", is what contributed substantially to loneliness in Japan? A lack of work-life balance? It seems to me that remote work could lessen this effect greatly. Also, you seem to be assuming it will just lead to people working from home alone. Japanese housing is notoriously small, and cafes ever-popular, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to speculate that this could lead to a boom in working from cafes and co-working spaces. Unlike a majority of the rest of the world, too, Japan has far less urban sprawl - so going to such places is less of a hassle. Seems to me this would do the opposite of what you suggest.
- ehnto 4y agoMaybe you mean suburban sprawl? Or maybe you just mean the urban area is less disjointed? Urban sprawl is exactly how I would characterize Japan, but maybe I just have the terminology wrong. It's actually one of the reasons I suspect such dense cities work so well, as the mixed zoning creates self serving blocks of commerce and residential. Like you've pointed out, it could actually make remote work a very vibrant lifestyle, full of coffee shops, cafes, regular faces and casual conversation. If I had to work remotely for the rest of my life, I'd choose Japan, so that I could walk out my front door and around the corner to pretty much anything I'll ever need. I can't do that in the suburbs, pretty much anything useful is a car journey away. I worked remotely from the suburbs for about 4 years, and it was incredibly isolating. There was no-where to go that fit into even an hour long break.
- oblio 4y ago> Maybe you mean suburban sprawl? Or maybe you just mean the urban area is less disjointed? Urban sprawl is exactly how I would characterize Japan, but maybe I just have the terminology wrong. No, he's right. Sprawl is inherently a negative term. Japan has large cities because you know, they can't put people in Manchuria (they've tried) or on the Moon, so they have to put them somewhere. So the most efficient way to house large numbers of people is in dense cities. The US is a great example of both urban sprawl (outside downtown, American cities have town to village population densities) and suburban sprawl. The worst of both worlds, really.
- bin_bash 4y agoI’ve never been there, but everything I hear about Japanese office culture sounds terrible: long hours, stodgy environment, forced participation in dangerous binge drinking. That said, pretty much everything else about Japanese culture seems awesome.
- benbristow 4y ago> forced participation in dangerous binge drinking In the UK we just voluntarily participate in dangerous binge drinking
- DeathArrow 4y agoThat might tempt me move to UK. :)
- srvmshr 4y agoHow about thinking that this will give them an opportunity for some mental relaxation as well? I live in Tokyo. The commutes are hour long one-way on average. Maybe it will give them more time & mental energy to explore other things.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cptaj 4y agoYes, having more free time will definitely help people have a social life
- samfisher83 4y agoNtt has 320k employees. I wonder what the other 290 will think?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mkl95 4y agoIn Southern Europe NTT is mostly a bodyshop. Their target demographic is junior engineers willing to do unpaid overtime for abysmal pay. Pretty sure remote work doesn't make a big difference.
- drnonsense42 4y agoIf you’re doing a lot of extra hours, not having to commute and getting some peace makes a huge difference in making it sustainable.
- permalac 4y agoBut if you work for them in Barcelona the salary is still pretty bad.
- DeathArrow 4y agoHow bad is pretty bad?
- oblio 4y agoI don't know about NTT, but salaries for software devs are really low in general. Think €30-40k per year. How FAANG are not leveraging such a poorly paid workforce in countries with a great climate, developed, safe, etc, I will never know.
- ben_w 4y agoI think the sort of person FAANG wants to hire, knows how much they can get from moving and has either already relocated or found remote work.
- nine_zeros 4y agoGood. As an oil importing country, their fuel consumption will keep going lower
- sofixa 4y agoI really doubt many people in Japan commute by car.
- bin_bash 4y agoThey’re one of the biggest importers of natural gas. Something has to run the Shinkansen.
- srvmshr 4y agoShinkansens run on electricity. Oil is mostly in the manufacturing and plastics industry, unlike other countries where domestic consumption is a significant share. (Tokyo power sector is mostly thermal and nuclear.)
- bin_bash 4y agoThey hardly produce any nuclear anymore. Natural gas is the largest source by far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan EDIT: these numbers appear to be old, since 2019 they’ve tuned reactors back on and stopped relying on LNG as much. I can’t find good numbers on recent data but in 2019 they imported more gas than any other country.
- srvmshr 4y agoFossil-fueled thermal power generation accounted for 71.7% of total electricity generated during the year [2021], down from 74.9% the previous year [2020]. Coal and LNG accounted for 26.5% and 31.7%, respectively, and both fossil fuels are on a declining trend. Nuclear power accounted for 5.9%, up from 4.3% the previous year. Source: https://www.isep.or.jp/en/1243/ https://www.isep.or.jp/en/1243/ Reference #4
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- thisiswrongggg 4y ago
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoJust say it if you got something to say, rather than this "hint: it's not what you think it is" shtick. If the argument is "companies will use remote work for their own benefits", no shit, that's what they've done with literally everything under the sun. It's not news companies are trying to socialize the risks and privatize the profits.
- Arcanum-XIII 4y agoWe could also say that you need the bay area salary to pay a colocation if you need to go into the office – that doesn’t remedy the issue. I’m losing 2 hours per day in my car (with the added pollution for it). There’s no decent solution to use public transport. At the office, I have the dubious joy of working on an open office – where I can’t focus. So my job is not great. That’s not to speak about the quality of the office ware (bad laptop, bad chair, bad screen, bad mouse…) I lose family time. I lose quality of life. I’m tired. Now let’s look at my home office. I have a 40″ screen, an aeron chair, a nice laptop (MacBook m1), a good gamer mouse and mouse pad. All that without my time in the traffic jam. I’m refreshed, able to work better and my boss got more out of me due to this. Since I’m a freelance, all this is factored in my daily rate. For one, my employer has the dubious pleasure of having me sit on a stool in his office that he pays for. For the other, he doesn’t observe me often, but get more quality effort out of me. So he lose. Every time. Let’s be honest: I’m lucky I have a home office. I guess lot of people do like to go see their colleagues – and I’m glad for them. Now, can’t we improve the situation so that everyone can choose to work the way they’re happier?
- ghaff 4y ago>Now, can’t we improve the situation so that everyone can choose to work the way they’re happier? One of the issues I hear is that, at many employers who are saying "Work wherever is most effective for you," a lot of offices are ghost towns. So you may see a handful of people, you're often hoteling, and the cafeteria is scaled back. So people who want to don't really have the option of going back to a pre-pandemic office. That said, I'm sure I'm in something of a bubble. The few times I've been driving near rush hour for some appointment, traffic has seemed to be pretty much pre-pandemic levels.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoYou love to see it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kmclean 4y agoUnnecessary commuting should always be included in working hours and expensed.
- djhaskin987 4y agoAre you going to expense your lunch breakfast dinner and rent as well? You need all those as well in order to work. If you work from home are you going to expense your electricity? Where is the line?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoYes. My employer (US fintech) gives me a daily meal stipend while working remotely, as well as covers my mobile phone, internet, and a portion to cover my home office. This excludes the annual equipment, desk, and chair stipend I receive. This was all outlined in our remote handbook provided with my offer letter.
- chrischen 4y agoIt used to be that meals were tax deductible (which is why Google offered meals) but that got restricted. If a company offers a meal stipend how does that work? Is it just bonus compensation but ear marked for food only?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoDepends on the company and how they're paying it out. I've seen food services where a daily credit is issued to your service account (funded by the org), I've seen it as bonus comp, etc. Whichever mechanism is used is usually some sort of crude optimization attempt for what's best for the org and the employee with whatever services and regulatory framework they're working with (wrt to taxes).
- fomine3 4y agoAre you in Europe?
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
- IceDane 4y agoI work for a subsidiary of NTT and we've been remote first for years, with travel expenses handled as outlined in the article. It's pretty great.
- 310260 4y agoOf course, US telecoms would never consider this despite NTT being one of the stodgiest on the planet.
- fomine3 4y agoAnother reason why big corp encourages telework (while there are some ventures don't encourage) is because their office in Tokyo is very expensive. Anyway it's good thing.