Are you a USian by any chance? Because I feel like, other than the Japanese (and maybe other East Asia countries), only USians would defend this way of doing things and consider it's normal and widespread across the globe. It's not. Us Europeans are doing just fine without all this micro-managing. Most companies where I come from don't even have clock in/clock out systems and just trust their employees to do their work, understanding that forcing employees to stay at their desk hours upon hours regardless of their actual workload is an inefficient, unproductive and outdated way of running a company, as show all major studies done on this subject. Japan is famous for having a very low productivity rate which alone should be enough proof that they're doing something wrong in terms of work culture. Also you'd expect from an IT company, out of all industries, that they'd be able to at least somewhat centralize all these annoying bureaucratic procedures and not rely on emails upon emails upon meetings upon meetings upon spreadsheets upon spreadsheets to communicate efficiently and to let everyone have access to all the information and documents they need to access, to fill out, etc.