[kyllo]

Speaking as someone who was recruited out of university into the management training program of a Korean conglomerate, the life these kids are headed for is indeed soul-crushing. Common activities will include trying to stay awake during two-hour meetings with no agenda, surfing the internet while pretending to work, but still having to stay for at least 10 hours, and mandatory evening drinking/karaoke parties with the boss. And consuming a fuckton of instant coffee and cigarettes.

[potatolicious]

Many white collar American megaconglomerates are similar, without the karaoke bits. Depressing offices in the middle of nowhere, endless pointless meetings, not a whole lot of real work and a lot of looking-busy. Office Space exists for a reason.

Hell, I once dated a consultant with Accenture who flew around constantly to client sites but seemed to just sit around once there racking up the billables.

"Mandatory partying with the coworkers/boss" seems to be something American corporate culture has largely avoided, but sadly the startup tech culture has embraced.

[w1ntermute]

If Korean conglomerates are so terribly managed, why have they been so successful?[0]

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River

[judk]

I know nothing about Korea, but one possibility is that a small phenomenal success generates an industry or makework that is effectively just siphoning off the value of the core success.

Imagine a startup that generates a $billion in profit from factory made gadgets, but reinvests the profit in bad ideas poorly implemented by office non-workers, effectively middle-class welfare jobs program.

[kyllo]

This.

Koreans have a strong sense of community, and are extremely group-oriented. Sharing, fairness within the group, and conformity to social norms are highly valued.

As a side effect, when a product becomes commercially successful, a large bureaucracy is quickly established underneath it, which subsidizes a lot of other unproductive activity and becomes dead wood over time.

[Bahamut]

From what I understand, the quality of life sucks in Korea. For example, I am told secondhand of some terrible working conditions in Samsung, and the reason why employees put up with it is because there are many Koreans willing to put up with awful conditions just to be able to say that they worked at Samsung & have a stable job.

[w1ntermute]

> From what I understand, the quality of life sucks in Korea.

I don't see any point in arguing about secondhand anecdotal data about working conditions at one specific company (I could regale you with a dozen such anecdotes heard from friends about working conditions at American companies), but South Korea's HDI is now 0.891, above countries like Japan, France, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy, and Spain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...

[yongjik]

I grew up in South Korea. Believe me, South Korean working condition sucks. As of 2013, South Koreans work 2163 hours per year on average, topped only by Mexico (2237) among OECD countries [1].

For comparison, Japan has 1735 hours, US has 1788, and Germany has 1388 hours.

As for the "success", well, somehow South Korea has experienced near-miraculous economic development during the 70s. Unfortunately, somehow we forgot to understand that economic development is a means of attaining better life: it became an end in itself. We can still find lots of people saying "Vacation? What vacation? How can we become a developed country (like the US or Japan) when we get all the same vacation as they do?"

Argh.

Edit: For extra craziness, replace "vacation" by "weekend". (Not unheard of.)

[1] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

[kyllo]

Yeah I think that attitude partly comes from the cultural idea that once you have children, you're supposed to sacrifice everything for their future (financial) prosperity. So there's an extremely high emphasis on education. The idea seems to be, work as much as possible and make your kids study as much as possible so that they can get into the best schools, and so that you can afford to pay for it. But the result is that the adults are so busy working and the kids so busy studying, that they don't spend nearly enough time together. There is no time left to enjoy each other's company, or enjoy life itself. It's just an endless grind.

[boyaka]

>Where do data for HDI computation come from? Life expectancy at birth is provided by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs – the UN Population Division; mean years of schooling are based on UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) educational attainment data and Barro and Lee (2013) methodology; expected years of schooling are provided by UIS; and GNI per capita in 2011 PPP by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

To me it sounds like a recipe for a miserable work life. The Japanese/Korean schooling systems are very tough and strict compared to other wealthy countries. Maybe this is why they became so wealthy? Also, this statistic claims to not be based on economic output, but it basically is. And in order get the highest economic output, that is going to require really hard work and a lot of rich people/companies/countries investing in you. Of course some countries have unfair advantages and don't need to work so hard.

[kyllo]

Yeah the system is basically optimized for "spend as much time at the office as possible" as a measure of productivity. Over a long period of time, with a lot of people, things do get done, but it's horribly inefficient. Meanwhile in a lot of other countries, hardly anyone even has an office to go to at all. Globally, the bar for productivity of human labor is really quite low.

[pavedwalden]

This comment was on its way to being greyed out when I came by (perhaps it was read as argumentative rather than inquisitive), but it's something that I wondered about too. Whenever I hear about terrible practices within an industry or particular company, I'm curious what counterbalancing factors allow it to carry on.

[w1ntermute]

I didn't mean to sound argumentative. I'm not suggesting that there aren't inefficiencies and problems with management at Korean conglomerates. I'm genuinely interested in this seeming contradiction, and in exactly how certain countries have managed to modernize so successfully, while others are stuck in a rut: http://i.imgur.com/yUoeWW0.png

[marveller]

This foreigner TV talk show discusses about this exact issue in Korea (starts around 14:50) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x24chlk