Top comment under the news article explains strong confounding by Hawthorne effect: "The participants worked harder during the trial because they wanted it to be successful. Once they implement it permanently, productivity will go to the clapper."
CEO of MSFT Japan moved to US after this experiment. It is funny to see that haha
This is not new. This how some swedish companies work.
“Took 25% less days of vacation” - so they traded a voluntary vacation day for a mandatory one? Reminds me of HP offering 3 weeks of vacation but you must take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Nice, but there is value in flexibility.
That’s ridiculous. The work week went from 5 days to 4. So if someone is going to take “a week’s vacation” - they only need to take 4 days. So if you look it from the view of a 5-day-a-week, then taking the same amount of vacation would mean taking 20% less. And if you look at it from the point of view of the 4-day-a-week people, then the 5-day-a-week people take 25% more vacation. And that’s all for taking the same amount of time in terms of weeks, which is how most people plan their vacations.
And that’s on top of the fact that they work 20% less days spread out over the entire year, which is asinine to compare it to forced ”take off a week between Christmas and New Year’s”
How is the workload in MSFT Japan - is it closer to MSFT US or other traditional Japanese companies? Because I can see how hourly productivity can increase with less time spent in office wasted on deadweight in the American MSFT case.
MSFT Japan is very localized- You need Japanese proficiency for eng role. I heard workload is crazy for business side, not sure about eng
Fake news. Know eng developers there who don’t know Japanese. Work is the same as Redmond.