Out of curiosity, do Japanese companies not use multi-shift schedules? A former employer of mine ran three shifts, particularly for hardware testing, and I don't see how such a schedule could work with that sentiment.
It's been a few years but I've known a number people who worked on the production lines at Intel's fabs in Hillsboro, Oregon. Many, if not all of them worked 3 twelve hour shifts each week. As I understand it the schedule is pretty common in production facilities of this type.
Note: I'm not commenting on the suitability of the practice, just on the fact that it's not unique to certain countries in Asia.
I don't get this. Why push your work force like this?
It's clearly very bad for the workers.
And also for the factory, surely having 3 shifts is more efficient because your workers are not as fatigued so will work faster with fewer mistakes?
I used to work with a team of Japanese devs who were visiting the US for some work. At our company we do 8 hours then go home. The devs told me that they didn't know what to do at home after work since they were used to working 12 hour days back in Japan.
Moving 2/3 of your existing engineering staff to a different shift would raise enormous large communications issues for a company otherwise designed for an aligned workday.
Hiring, say, minimum 4 people to do nothing but waiting for a page would be incredibly wasteful and probably ineffective as they'd have no idea what to do if something went wrong because they didn't work on the system.
That looks like it's about round-the-clock shifts for factory workers. I can think of a lot of differences between that and, say, computer programmers that might render the conclusion less relevant.
For example, I don't know any software companies in the world that build software with 3 8-hour shifts of workers.
Yeah, I think the article's description of working hours is a bit extreme. In my time in Japan, I noticed two distinct rush hours on the trains and expressways in major Japanese cities: one around 8-9am, and another around 5-6pm. That seems like a pretty normal working day to me. If everyone was putting in 8 hours of overtime, the evening rush hour would start a lot later. (And it's not like the employees are going home and continuing to work for many more hours. Remote work is not common in Japan.)
I think it's common to work 9:00-19:00, 9:30-20:00. That's my schedule (working at a bank). Sometimes I also have to connect in the middle of the night if there's a problem in some other time zone. I haven't ever heard of a programmer working 9-5 in Tokyo.
A few decades ago, I have worked for some years in an European semiconductor fab. There the R&D engineers also worked in 3 shifts, to follow experimental wafer batches all day.
However, most of the time the R&D engineers worked in the normal shift. By rotation, a few worked in the evening shift and even fewer worked in the night shift, typically only when it was expected that after finishing some process step it will be necessary to measure test structures on the experimental silicon wafers and make decisions about process parameters for the following process steps.
So work at least partially in shifts is really expected in such an environment, because it is inefficient and costly to stop the processing of a wafer batch and wait until next morning, when an R&D engineer would come and would decide what to do with the wafers next.
> Or (which is afaik the default in Germany) run the fab with three 8 hour shifts per day.
That seems reasonable, as long as workers have a stable schedule rather than the 'flex time' insanity that plagues many US workplaces.
That said, I imagine there are productivity tradeoffs between fresher workers (esp. at end of shift) vs. more handoffs between shifts and higher headcount of both workers and managers (so more communication overhead). How does that work out in practice?
Can you clarify who is "us"? Facebook employees? Or programmers working in American tech companies in general?
I live in Japan. In 99% of Japanese companies, and even most of the foreign ones, there's no such thing as flexible working hours. I'm curious to know how common it is in the US.
Is it really unworkable though? Shift work has always been common in factories. Outsourced call centers in Asia sometimes work during US daytime hours.
It is not uncommon for factory workers to prefer 12 hour shifts and working alternating 3 and 4 day work weeks. That staffs a 24x7 operation with four crews of workers.
Umm manufacturing, think of healthcare. It's not uncommon for inpatient nursing to do 12-hour shifts and doctors do seven of days/nights of 12-hour shifts.
But they may be able to hire additional shifts or work overtime on existing production lines.
Not every plant is run at a constant 24x7 three shift schedule. There are plenty of businesses that keep some slack in their manufacturing to respond to changes in demand as part of their corporate strategy, especially if they think there's an opportunity to gain market share.
reply