Hard work pays!

After a "hard" day's work, i reached the station at 11.49 PM. Now If you are thinking, i will be greeted by a deserted platform, well, think again!
In Japan, this is what you will see!

The train station gets more and more crowded as the evening wears off. you will not be incorrect if you think most of these people are just leaving from work and of course, most of them would have started their day at 8.00 AM.

In fact, i wasn't the last guy out of office as well. I could see a few buried heads into their laptops.
Of course, it is a well documented fact that the Japanese are one of the most hard working lot in the world. Yes, the mandated working hours is still 40 hrs/week, but i am sure most of them would hit that figure by mid week.

On the surface though it is quite admirable that people here are committed and dedicated about their work.
But scratch the surface a little, you will surely notice, hard work is not directly proportional to productivity here.
Mind you,i am not in any way undermining their zeal for perfection and their commitment, but, come on, things can be done faster!
So if you ask an Indian worker to jump of a cliff and find out whats at the bottom, he will do it, break his nose and figure out he has hit a rock. Job done in 5 mins minus a nose.
Now if you have a japanese do it, he would come equipped with all sorts of equipments to figure out all details required to jump of a cliff, do some crazy impact analysis and figure out there is a rock, which weighs x grams, has been there for y years and has the capacity to break a nose.
Well you would be awed at the level of detail and the accuracy but of course you would have to wait for some time!

Get my point?

So how do you meet schedules, especially in IT where time is a luxury? Slog! Slog till the last train leaves!

So its not SMART WORK, but HARD WORK is what the Japanese office goer believes!
and looking at Japan, you can say "hard work pays!"