Hacker News Reader

Comment by theredbox | Hacker News Reader

Well not even Samsung can do proper SW engineering (it's an insanely failed side of Samsung and yeah it's that bad) and they can pay top dollar.

Koreans just cant really do b2c products that well that are not hardware.

View on HN

Korea doesn’t value software engineers like Silicon Valley does. Over there, it is considered menial work and the pay is VERY substandard. This has been true as recently as 2018, but it is (too slowly) starting to change. The only FAANG with an engineering office in Seoul is Google.

Is there any reason why global corporations aren't opening engineering offices there? Seems obvious knowledge-salary arbitrage.

Language barriers, timezones (their night is our day; it is flipped). Most skilled Korean software engineers end up in the Valley. Remote development only goes so far.

I don't see it any differently than companies with an office in India. While English is not a national language in RoK, Koreans are still taught English early. In my limited experience, being married to a Korean and having worked with Indians, Korean professionals speak English about as well as Indian professionals.

The timezone is similar: India is 10 hours forward from America/New_York, RoK is 12 hours forward. Flights to RoK (12-14 hours) are actually significantly shorter than flights to India (20 hours).

Indians are probably paid less than Koreans, but I don't know. And I cannot speak to the technical proficiencies of either.

I'd definitely like to open an office in RoK some time.

If anyone on here has done so or is interested, send me an email.

Are you interested in moving to RoK? Either way expect salaries at around 50-60k so not that cheap. And also the talent pool is rather small. The English proficiency is almost non existent.

At the right time, for the right company, definitely.

Same with Japan. Read some of patio11's posts on that.

My terrible experiences with the remote-control app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.panasonic....) for my otherwise-fine mirrorless cameras now makes total sense. Even though the app has received constant updates for years, it's still extremely unreliable, and looks like hasn't had a visual update in ten years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com