Yes, its not a myth, we all start work at 9AM and knock off at 5PM sharp.
By 4.30PM, the pub is full and by 5PM the road is jam packed, (no AnfieldKnight we are not driving home drunk, we have only had 2 standard drinks I swear).
I won't try to do a "balanced" analysis like in the tax article and tell you how working in one country has its pros and cons, because the truth is, I've worked in both countries in professional graduate level (as in where you have to be at least a degree graduate to get the job, not as in fresh graduate so you don't know anything) office roles and working in Australia is just much better. People are mostly respectful because of the (relatively) strong workplace bullying and harassment laws and industrial relations framework (administered by independent bodies and a complex industrial relations process I won't bore you with). Obviously there are always assholes, but this is city and industry specific, and on average, working in Australia definitely shaves less years off your life span. Generally, for more money as well (minimum wage and enterprise bargaining, baby).
To add a bit of context, Australia is a country of approximately 25 million (at last count). Just like you have 9 to 5 public service jobs where everybody is at the lift by 5 (6pm for Singapore, because you need an extra hour at work to catch up on the gossip), in Australia you also have (surprise!) satki banking and high flyer jobs where people are working and sending emails at 12 midnight, FIFO (Fly in Fly Out) mine jobs where you don't see your family for weeks, shifts, etc. You get the drift.
Yes, people still send emails at 9PM when they're working on a key project, but don't expect a reply immediately - people only stay back in the office if there really is work to do, and if you have kids to pick up at 5PM, you inform your boss you're leaving at 5PM and then if you feel responsible and want that promotion, you work from home (obviously only applicable to certain jobs) and then spend the next day feeling sheepish because your boss genuinely says "you shouldn't have darls"!
Generally, there is a respect for peoples' lives and their personal responsibilities. They don't expect you to cancel your family holiday planned one year in advance, or abandon your sick child because the boss doesn't know how to save his Microsoft Word document. In most of our satki banking and accountancy jobs, there are tight deadlines, but people realise nobody dies if the spreadsheet is 15 minutes late.
Also, because the "I'm better than you because I have a white collar job" shit we're used to in Singapore is frowned upon very much here, it is seen as management responsibility to ensure the efficient allocation of resources and time. People aren't afraid to speak up against their bosses, so if you have no fucking idea what you're doing you lose respect and get laughed out of the room pretty quickly through the upward feedback process (most of the time).
In a commercial company, this results in real consequences in very competitive industries, so it is normally in the interests of senior management to wake up their ideas (senior management as in CEO, CFO, etc., not senior account manager FYI).
This is usually why most Singaporeans who came from management positions (especially from the Singaporean public service) usually struggle (at least initially) with this whole idea of actually having to know what they are doing, having kissed asses all the way up without actually having any competence (I know right, what a radical idea!)
Try texting someone at 10PM about work and see what the response is in Australia....
When a friend who was going back to Singapore having worked for a number of years in Australia interviewed with a Singaporean company, they asked him if he could adapt back to Singapore working culture having worked in Australia for so long. Obviously somebody had a chip on the shoulder, and it would have helped if said friend was AMDK (unfortunately he wasn't), but I think what they meant was whether he could adapt to everyone not having a fucking clue what they were doing and staying back late to look at memes or holding pointless meetings about holding pointless meetings...
You don't need a fancy economics degree from NUS (since Melbourne Uni and ANU is behkan and a total of 8 and 20 places behind NUS on the world rankings) to know intuitively that technological advancement increases productivity. Well, technological advancement come from where? Not from IDA Singapore and their SPU degrees, or glossy pamphlets touting stupid taglines like "Smart Nation" etc...
In Singapore, we think so little, thus we do so much, yet we achieve so little. What the fuck is the point of holding a weekly team meeting at 8.30PM (true story), or holding pointless meetings to ramble on and blame the minions about why so little work is getting done (well, guess what the minions could have been doing if they weren't sitting in this stupid meeting?)
I don't need to go into the details of NS-learnt skills like wayang, but just visualise a bit, if everyone wayang, no one actually does anything, and it all adds up.
We aren't saying Australian work culture is perfect. Recently there has been an attack on science and research funding, and generally, smart people who know what their doing, in favour of people who organise people who know what their doing (i.e. "managers"). But remember, in a place where you can speak up without fear of recrimination (generally), people speak up to reverse this trend, with the mere existence of that ABC article in the link above telling of the difference - imagine the Straits Times PAP newsletter writing an article criticising the Singapore Government? In the end, in Australia, we still got hope because people speak up when they see a stupid idea. Meanwhile, you have a Prime Minister whose name has been dragged in the mud and people start blaming the ones who blew the whistle...
Also, we don't take long lunches in Australia - remember, chicken rice so expensive!! So, we "meal prep" and tapau avocado salads (or whatever the latest clean eating fitness fad diet is that promises to make you look like or be able to date someone who looks like the girls in the picture below) from home, eat them in the pantry, go out for rokok / chai latte, and come back and continue working so we can all fuck off at 5PM instead of going for two hour lunches.
I've written this from the point of view of a 9 to 5 graduate office job having been relatively lucky in my career so far, but obviously, there is a whole other article to write about the trades and other more interesting jobs which I'll leave to the rest to write. Working in the same industry as I was in Singapore, I'm working half the hours for about 20-30% more than what I would have got in Singapore (of course, all that gets spent on $15 chicken rice and $20 avocado smashes given the HIGH cost of living in Austraaaaalia)...
Anyway, a caveat is that all workplace cultures differ according to the type of job, the place, and the people, and this article is biased towards that 9 to 5 office job. See video below for a general day in the life of an office worker:
But generally, the workplace protections and industrial rights are much better, and unless you are a senior executive (again, I mean like a CEO of a large company, etc., not senior executive account manager or Senior Executive Emeritus CEO of your one person company run from the bedroom you share with your brother worth $0.50) who doesn't like paying tax and loves praising governments which give low personal income taxes and high corporate welfare, and who wants complete deference from your subordinates (If you were, you shouldn't really be reading this shitty blog for peasants but wiping your ass and windows with that copy of the Financial Times. I hear the paper is made of really good quality, FYI) I couldn't think of any jobs where you'd be better off working in Singapore....
By 4.30PM, the pub is full and by 5PM the road is jam packed, (no AnfieldKnight we are not driving home drunk, we have only had 2 standard drinks I swear).
I won't try to do a "balanced" analysis like in the tax article and tell you how working in one country has its pros and cons, because the truth is, I've worked in both countries in professional graduate level (as in where you have to be at least a degree graduate to get the job, not as in fresh graduate so you don't know anything) office roles and working in Australia is just much better. People are mostly respectful because of the (relatively) strong workplace bullying and harassment laws and industrial relations framework (administered by independent bodies and a complex industrial relations process I won't bore you with). Obviously there are always assholes, but this is city and industry specific, and on average, working in Australia definitely shaves less years off your life span. Generally, for more money as well (minimum wage and enterprise bargaining, baby).
To add a bit of context, Australia is a country of approximately 25 million (at last count). Just like you have 9 to 5 public service jobs where everybody is at the lift by 5 (6pm for Singapore, because you need an extra hour at work to catch up on the gossip), in Australia you also have (surprise!) satki banking and high flyer jobs where people are working and sending emails at 12 midnight, FIFO (Fly in Fly Out) mine jobs where you don't see your family for weeks, shifts, etc. You get the drift.
Yes, people still send emails at 9PM when they're working on a key project, but don't expect a reply immediately - people only stay back in the office if there really is work to do, and if you have kids to pick up at 5PM, you inform your boss you're leaving at 5PM and then if you feel responsible and want that promotion, you work from home (obviously only applicable to certain jobs) and then spend the next day feeling sheepish because your boss genuinely says "you shouldn't have darls"!
Generally, there is a respect for peoples' lives and their personal responsibilities. They don't expect you to cancel your family holiday planned one year in advance, or abandon your sick child because the boss doesn't know how to save his Microsoft Word document. In most of our satki banking and accountancy jobs, there are tight deadlines, but people realise nobody dies if the spreadsheet is 15 minutes late.
Also, because the "I'm better than you because I have a white collar job" shit we're used to in Singapore is frowned upon very much here, it is seen as management responsibility to ensure the efficient allocation of resources and time. People aren't afraid to speak up against their bosses, so if you have no fucking idea what you're doing you lose respect and get laughed out of the room pretty quickly through the upward feedback process (most of the time).
In a commercial company, this results in real consequences in very competitive industries, so it is normally in the interests of senior management to wake up their ideas (senior management as in CEO, CFO, etc., not senior account manager FYI).
This is usually why most Singaporeans who came from management positions (especially from the Singaporean public service) usually struggle (at least initially) with this whole idea of actually having to know what they are doing, having kissed asses all the way up without actually having any competence (I know right, what a radical idea!)
Try texting someone at 10PM about work and see what the response is in Australia....
When a friend who was going back to Singapore having worked for a number of years in Australia interviewed with a Singaporean company, they asked him if he could adapt back to Singapore working culture having worked in Australia for so long. Obviously somebody had a chip on the shoulder, and it would have helped if said friend was AMDK (unfortunately he wasn't), but I think what they meant was whether he could adapt to everyone not having a fucking clue what they were doing and staying back late to look at memes or holding pointless meetings about holding pointless meetings...
You don't need a fancy economics degree from NUS (since Melbourne Uni and ANU is behkan and a total of 8 and 20 places behind NUS on the world rankings) to know intuitively that technological advancement increases productivity. Well, technological advancement come from where? Not from IDA Singapore and their SPU degrees, or glossy pamphlets touting stupid taglines like "Smart Nation" etc...
...but from dissenting voices, debates, ideas, and people who do things differently like the once-ignored Sim Wong Hoo.
In Singapore, we think so little, thus we do so much, yet we achieve so little. What the fuck is the point of holding a weekly team meeting at 8.30PM (true story), or holding pointless meetings to ramble on and blame the minions about why so little work is getting done (well, guess what the minions could have been doing if they weren't sitting in this stupid meeting?)
I don't need to go into the details of NS-learnt skills like wayang, but just visualise a bit, if everyone wayang, no one actually does anything, and it all adds up.
We aren't saying Australian work culture is perfect. Recently there has been an attack on science and research funding, and generally, smart people who know what their doing, in favour of people who organise people who know what their doing (i.e. "managers"). But remember, in a place where you can speak up without fear of recrimination (generally), people speak up to reverse this trend, with the mere existence of that ABC article in the link above telling of the difference - imagine the Straits Times PAP newsletter writing an article criticising the Singapore Government? In the end, in Australia, we still got hope because people speak up when they see a stupid idea. Meanwhile, you have a Prime Minister whose name has been dragged in the mud and people start blaming the ones who blew the whistle...
Also, we don't take long lunches in Australia - remember, chicken rice so expensive!! So, we "meal prep" and tapau avocado salads (or whatever the latest clean eating fitness fad diet is that promises to make you look like or be able to date someone who looks like the girls in the picture below) from home, eat them in the pantry, go out for rokok / chai latte, and come back and continue working so we can all fuck off at 5PM instead of going for two hour lunches.
I've written this from the point of view of a 9 to 5 graduate office job having been relatively lucky in my career so far, but obviously, there is a whole other article to write about the trades and other more interesting jobs which I'll leave to the rest to write. Working in the same industry as I was in Singapore, I'm working half the hours for about 20-30% more than what I would have got in Singapore (of course, all that gets spent on $15 chicken rice and $20 avocado smashes given the HIGH cost of living in Austraaaaalia)...
Anyway, a caveat is that all workplace cultures differ according to the type of job, the place, and the people, and this article is biased towards that 9 to 5 office job. See video below for a general day in the life of an office worker:
But generally, the workplace protections and industrial rights are much better, and unless you are a senior executive (again, I mean like a CEO of a large company, etc., not senior executive account manager or Senior Executive Emeritus CEO of your one person company run from the bedroom you share with your brother worth $0.50) who doesn't like paying tax and loves praising governments which give low personal income taxes and high corporate welfare, and who wants complete deference from your subordinates (If you were, you shouldn't really be reading this shitty blog for peasants but wiping your ass and windows with that copy of the Financial Times. I hear the paper is made of really good quality, FYI) I couldn't think of any jobs where you'd be better off working in Singapore....
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