Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

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What did you work as? A lot of Western foreigners in Korea work as English teachers, which indeed rarely offers any sort of long-term promotion path (see my longer comment).

Even outside of that it's very easy to run into a glass ceiling as a foreigner though, yeah. There's relatively few companies where you can work your way up into lead or management positions - though this is often because foreigners simply don't acquire the Korean skills they'd need to manage Koreans. There's some amount of luck and strategizing your career path involved to make it work, and that does leave you with narrow paths to the goal. Engineering and market research/business are probably the easiest fields at least.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really blaming anyone for failing to make it work and getting out. There's a lot of wishes/desires (in choice of job, in choice of lifestyle, etc.) that are legitimately and totally incompatible with life in Korea as a foreigner, yet have nothing wrong about them.

I was a software engineer at the company that makes exploding smartphones.

I still had plenty of headroom regarding promotions, and I'd argue that Korean skills are a double-edged sword.

In big and rigid corporations, saying that you need luck is an understatement. Short of your VP being fired, it's typically impossible to make significant moves within your company.

3 months at that same company did it to me.

For me it was the work culture at the company. Problem wasn't that they expected me to work late nights, weekends and what not. By the way, they did want me to do all that, of course.

The problem, the real problem, was they just didn't get it why I wouldn't want to spend my evenings and nights, and weekends in the office fixing bugs, writing code etc. They really didn't get it. By "they" I mean my colleagues and managers there.

Language barrier was another problem. Your team might have been a bit different on this but in my team it was difficult to communicate in English. And so was outside.

But whatever the communication I could manage, esp. with people outside work, it was really really awesome. But that was too little, too seldom.

> The problem, the real problem, was they just didn't get it why I wouldn't want to spend my evenings and nights, and weekends in the office fixing bugs, writing code etc. They really didn't get it. By "they" I mean my colleagues and managers there.

Hmm. The Koreans around me do get it. They gripe about it all the time. It's just inertia holding things back. But there are changes; around me I hear more and more of former employees litigating against former employers on contract issues, and succeeding. There's still much left to do in the way of labor law enforcement, though. But it's not "헬조선" for no reason.

> Your team might have been a bit different on this but in my team it was difficult to communicate in English. And so was outside.

Of course, imagine a Korean immigrant in the US writing "it was difficult to communicate in Korean".

> Of course, imagine a Korean immigrant in the US writing "it was difficult to communicate in Korean".

This is a bit unfair when the company we're talking about goes out of its way to recruit and relocate skilled workers from overseas to Korea, knowing than most will never have the time or motivation to learn the language to a professional level.

And yes, I know that shoving English down the throats of 97% of your employees isn't too cool and doesn't make a lot of sense in some teams, but English proficiency is one of the requirements to get a job there. It'd probably be more efficient to have an English only "global division" with mostly (but not only) foreigners, like Rakuten has in Japan. Fun fact: over the period of a short year, one of the two EVPs of my division wasn't a Korean speaker.

> This is a bit unfair when the company we're talking about goes out of its way to recruit and relocate skilled workers from overseas to Korea, knowing than most will never have the time or motivation to learn the language to a professional level.

This is correct, except it's often not the people (generic) you end up having comm difficulities with who made the strategic recruitment decision, which is why things don't work out all the way down. Language barrier and not wanting to put up with it is a legitimate way to want to get out, personally, but I sometimes hear the complaint publically voiced in a way that's at least unempathetic (e.g. toward the amount of stress and embarassment being required to speak English can cause Korean employees). Which then creates follow-on strife like Koreans complaining to me that "Americans are arrogant and only want to speak English wherever they go", and so on, and so forth, which puts me in an awkward spot.

It's best to go in expecting a language barrier, and doing the reversed-roles thought experiment helps.

If you don't know how to speak Korean, go back to your own country.

Thanks for sharing. Regarding Korean skills being a double-edged sword, yeah, expectations leveled against you rise with your skills, and there's a high bar before those skills really pay off meaningfully (in a job context - in private life they pay off almost immediately), so there's a tough plateau inbetween.

Super interesting that you're in Berlin now - that's where I came from.

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