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South Korea To Shut Off Computers Past 19:00 Hours To Stop People Working Late (bbc.com)
dryriver shares a report from the BBC: The government in South Korea's capital is introducing a new initiative to force its employees to leave work on time -- by powering down all their computers at 20:00 on Fridays. It says it is trying to stop a "culture of working overtime." South Korea has some of the longest working hours in the world. Government employees there work an average of 2,739 hours a year -- about 1,000 hours more than workers in other developed countries. The shutdown initiative in the Seoul Metropolitan Government is set to roll out across three phases over the next three months. The program will begin on March 30, with all computers switched off by 20:00. The second phase starts in April, with employees having their computers turned off by 19:30 on the second and fourth Friday that month. From May on, the program will be in full-swing, with computers shut off by 19:00 every Friday. According to a SMG statement, all employees will be subjected to the shutdown, though exemptions may be provided in special circumstances. However, not every government worker seems to be on-board -- according to the SMG, 67.1% of government workers have asked to be exempt from the forced lights-out. Earlier this month, South Korea's national assembly passed a law to cut down the maximum weekly working hours to 52, down from 68.'
So... is it past 20:00 on Fridays, or past 19:00 every day?
What slackers. In Seattle we work 110 hours a week.
Some of us work better on other schedules. Mandating things like this is a bad idea based on bad data from baaad sheep.
In Japan most of the people who stay late do not actually work more, they stay late to look "good", to show they dedicate their lives to the company. Is it the same in (South) Korea?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Is that S. Koreans would rather work overtime than be with their spouses.
some of these people are using these same computers to do other things at home ... and that's why they oppose the new hours...
Maybe the government wants to reduce overtime payments by getting employees to leave early. Then they reduce the government budget. Or perhaps get departments to expand. Cutting down on salaries like that would encourage workers to seek other ways of getting a pay rise.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Whippings have been ordered stopped between 2000 and 2300 on Sundays, to give the guards' arms some rest.
So 2700 hours is 1000 more than "other developed countries"? Let's see; a standard 40-hour workweek times 50 weeks a year is 2,000 hours (less, if you get more than 2 weeks vacation, and a lot of people do...) So either somebody can't do math, or a lot of other "developed" countries are working a lot less than we Americans do.
With the diet here I have diarrhea and am sitting on the shitter at least 40 hours a week as it is!
What the hell are those.... :P
[($)]
No one can impose this type of ridiculous mandate in America because over here nobody gives a fuck what the authority says.
But for the Koreans, they would toe the line, as strictly as their leaders tell them to.
Koreans are sheeple
Go away, IVAN
What's to stop employers from forcing their employees to work earlier?
edit: retail
Obviously this decision was porn-related
Rather tough for people on life support ... "The machine is keeping him alive but we need to switch it off at 19:00"
So if something crashes at 16:00 (when people are still at the office), but isn't fixed by 19:00, it stays broken until the morning?
I guess that may be why 67.1% have "asked" to be exempt.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Email is Only for Old People (who have already retired, and can use the internet at home).
....and change the cultural view that in order to be respected and have job security you need to bend over backwards.
Take from this what you will bc it's purely anecdotal, but my friend in SK says everyone in the office goes out drinking at night together and the entire office is nursing their hangovers for the better part of most mornings and early afternoons. I have a friend in Japan that says everyone spends so much time nurturing their social connections through gossip that they end up having to stay late to get their work done.
This isn't by any means specific to Asian countries: in most of the places I've worked, the vast majority of the people working long hours were either milking overtime or incompetent. Long or late hours don't always translate into productivity.
In context, this is from the same country where the government mandates that tutoring centers (known as hagwon or "cram schools") all close at 10pm because students would be there until 2am in the morning during weekdays. Also to be noted that students and parents protested this government ordinance because they were afraid that students would fall behind their peers in the high pressure education environment in Korea. To this day, students and hagwon operators regularly flout the law, covering up windows and going cloak and dagger when government inspectors come by.
Some one would spend some 50 or 60 hours working on setting up a simulation and they will ask for help because the answers are wrong. Our tech support would find they have worked on completely irrelevant portions of the models, and missed big important settings. They read our manuals in English, use an English-Korean dictionary, misunderstand a few terms, and waste all the effort. Simple things like missing the line that says, ".. Let the power loss be rho (greek symbol)..." and assume rho means specific gravity or something as defined in some other discussion in some other chaper. By the time they come around ask for clarification, it is so difficult because till you figure out they are misunderstanding the definition of rho, you can not make head or tails of the discussion.
It is truly mind boggling, they turn out fantastic products, but how they manage to do it with this level of inefficiency I am not able to explain at all. I am missing something, Dont know what.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So everybody can come to work at 3am and turn their computer back on?
and in 2020 if they get rid of last train then there will be no hard cut off time
The government has this nefarious scheme of abolishing Daylight Savings Time, starting with the South, to show the mighty dictator up north Kim Jong Whats-his-face that superior firepower or not, nobody but Seoul's government can show everyone when the weekend actually starts.
Robots will be coming in, not to replace these workers; but they will roll into the workers' production floors and cubicle farms, little roombas to huge Hoover Big Suckas gathering their coordinates and creating schematics for the ultimate cleaning force -- all made in Korea.
You'll need to have more workers to do your dirty work in the allowed time.
Bush lied and people died!!!!
SO no LG, Sony, KIA tech support after hours, Who's hours?