Work Ethic

Working conditions and management in Japan suck

(Please note: I'm not ranting about my particular situation here. I think I'm luckier than most in this country.)

Ok, can I just say? The work ethic in this country is perverse. Almost everyone I know is forced to work ridiculous uncompensated overtime hours, has vacation days arbitrarily taken away, and has to submit to the most unreasonable and irrational of demands and policies. This doesn't seem to be an artifact of any one company, or any one industry, or even any social class. Everybody is forced to work way too hard here, and for no good reason.

One thing that bothers me is that this does NOT lead to an introspection and improvement of management practices, when there are SIMPLE solutions and ways to make the system better for everyone. Instead, it just leads to people going through more and more unnecessary pain.

Of course this isn't just a problem in Japan. It's happening everywhere, but Japan seems to be particularly bad, maybe because they're still stuck in their "work harder not smarter" mindset. It's like they seek out hardship here.

The BI-I-IG PICTURE - Technology fuels evil.

I'm going to go to bed now because I think I'm starting to catch a cold, but in short I think that the worldwide problem of overwork is a direct result of (a) the centralizing effects of technology putting far too much power in far too few hands and (b) the global interconnectedness of trade and communication increasing competition to an extreme level, throwing the entire system out of balance in favor of corporate power at the cost of humanity.

Technology widens the gap between rich and poor.

I'm not saying that we try to stop "progress"... that's impossible. I'm just saying that we need to try and spread it around. It's the gap between the time when technology is developed and the time when its benefits finally filter down to the poorest people that fuels so many of this world's problems. We as a world need to redirect our resources from developing technology to distributing that technology.

I know this tirade against technology sounds hypocritical, being that I do robotics research for a living. I love my job, but I also see the bigger problem. Anybody have any solutions?

This is kind of a long, three-part essay, but it presents exactly the problems I'm concerned about. You can just jump to part 3, and then read the other parts if you're still interested...

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

The awesome thing is that I found that in the list of references in the back of a paper I was reading today on high-speed algorithms to fit data to lines and curves...