Hacker News Reader

Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a chaebol in the U.S. (not Hyundai). I can attest to the two-week indoctrination session in the Korean countryside, never leaving before your boss, never ever contradicting a Korean manager, organizational structure modeled after the Korean military, the whole nine yards. It's brutal. I'm glad Hyundai are living up to their name (modern) and beginning to shed the old way of doing business.

View on HN

Also, and completely tangential to the point, I want to mention that Korean mobile-phone / meeting etiquette is very interesting. You don't leave the room to take a call. Instead, you turn toward the wall, lean over, say "yo bo sae o", and then hold a conversation that is audible to the rest of the room only as a series of quiet murmurs. I think Korean phonemes are somehow optimal for very quiet conversations like this. Maybe because there aren't very many, and they're pretty distinct from each other. I have no science to back that up.

"yo bo sae o" is just the standard korean phone greeting, not just used in that context. Thanks for contributing, btw!

So how do you handle the situation if a Korean manager is wrong about something?

That culture sounds like it would be extremely damaging to conductive effective business.

This phenomenon appears in more than one culture, and I think in just about every culture it is damaging to conducting effective business, but not _extremely_.

Only companies big enough to endure this kind of damage (or smart enough to make sure it doesn't happen) are the ones that make it. If you're running a startup with 3-5 people, and someone is wrong about something, chances are the stakes are much much larger than a 100 person company. As such, you can't afford to have this kind of culture at startup scale, but you can, at large scale, because everyone gets more chances to be wrong (and have the company stay afloat). Then you start thinking about 1,000+, 10,000+, 100,000+ people companies and you can imagine how many small inefficiencies/mistakes like this companies can withstand.

Depending on where you work in the US, there are still managers/bosses that don't like to be contradicted, because of some perception of loss of authority/power/credibility/etc (and most likely some personal insecurity).

Not just business:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509

In most cultures co-pilots are encouraged to speak out when the pilot has or is about to make a mistake. There were several Korean Air crashes where the co-pilots knew the pilot was wrong and did nothing, in some cases costing them their lives. After recognizing this there was a strong push to change the culture at Korean Air, but I don't know that this was a lesson brought over to other industries.

Yes, that's Malcolm Gladwell's theory. The facts are, as ever, more complicated:

http://askakorean.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/culturalism-gladwe...

Here's another layer of complication. Gladwell twists the truth a bit to make a good story, however AskAKorean also twists the truth a bit to make a good refutation. Based on the transcript that AskAKorea posted, it's very clear that the first officer is acting deferentially to the pilot. Specifically, the first officer uses polite speech with the pilot, and the pilot uses familiar speech with the first officer. This indicates quite a big social status gap. As an example, in my company (I am working in Korea), neither my manager nor my manager's manager uses familiar speech with me, I'd have to go up 3 levels for that to start happening. What Gladwell mentioned in his book about hierarchy does not feel exaggerated, and there's likely a large grain of truth to Gladwell's representation of what happened. Also, if you look through AskAKorean's previous blogs, you can notice a fairly nationalistic streak in his posts, which may explain his strong opinions regarding Gladwell's assertions.

> So how do you handle the situation if a Korean manager is wrong about something?

Do the wrong thing that your manager requests and suffer the consequences.

The same things go on in America, just under slightly different guises, I would say. This is a not-uncommon pattern:

0) There is a problem that needs to be fixed.

1) Boss recommends A

2) Engineer knows A won't work, but they try it anyway

3) A doesn't work, so they stay up late implementing B. (Of course, they wouldn't have had to stay up late had they just been allowed to implement B first...)

4) B works

5) Boss takes the credit

6) After years of making the boss look good, engineer gets promoted

Are there many women in chaebols in non-secretarial positions?

I would say so, yes. I'm sure the ratio could be higher but women are well-represented nonetheless.

well in the entry level positions but most of those women marry other chaeabol company men - often their superiors - and then some stop working once they marry

Yes. A lot more than in your average tech company. You still don't see that many female executives, but at the bottom, the influx of fresh grad hires is pretty much 50/50.

Yes, and speaking from experience they were the better managers to work with. There are also significant numbers of women employed in technical roles outside of the chaebols, I found the ratio of female-to-male programmers and engineers was much higher than in the US or Australia.

No, South Korea is arguably the least equal, developed nation.

"Korean women with high levels of education actually have a more difficult time being accommodated in the workforce. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2012, the current ratio of women to men in upper management positions and public office is a meager 1 to 9. At 104th, Korea ranks below some of the world’s least developed countries, such as Burkina Faso, Malawi and Syria."

"Women in Korea make on average 39 percent less than men. This difference in wages ranks Korea bottom amongst peer nations in regards to pay equality."

http://thediplomat.com/2014/05/south-koreas-woeful-workplace...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com