I wonder what sort of work most of them are doing? The article doesn't really go into specifics. For software development, at least, the job market seems really shallow, and you pay the price literally, and in what sort of work you can do as well. Compare the job market in e.g. Seattle with 1/10th the population, yet somehow there is more to do. Tokyo is nice, but there is never going to be a thriving tech community here if the pay is terrible and projects pointless and boring. For my part, I will probably leave soon :-(
e: In many cases, the graduates won't actually know what they'll be doing until after they're hired. So maybe that's why there isn't a breakdown by field of work.
Yes, I've been a software developer here for a number of years. You can find something, but you will be a lot more limited in the kind of work you can do, and the salary you can demand. Over the long term this can have pretty serious career consequences. If you just want to come here for a few years as a semi-temporary thing, you'll do fine. But, if you are thinking about putting down roots here, well, good luck :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.)
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
As a westerner who had his soul crushed once by the machine there, I can attest.
That being said, I do think that it's not as bad if you look foreign (esp if you're white). You also need to be able to ignore the norms even if you are aware of them. If you start worrying about complying with the norms that you know are there but aren't quite sure where the boundaries are (like I did), then your soul is guaranteed to be crushed.
Nah. Many small firms and tech-oriented startups are much more casual and often liberal too, so no worry. I (as a native Japanese) work for a small tech company in Tokyo. The workplace is pretty friendly and negotiable. I bike to my work and have a power nap every day. I can have weeklong vacations a few times a year. The pay is not as great as the big guys, but generally I consider it a good life. Good luck with job searching!
Even large Japanese companies already started to think the overly standardized screening process didn't fit the current world of internationalization. So it unlikely happen that just wading a blue shirt or carrying a nylon bag cause your interview failure.
The company I worked for in Japan (enormous engineering company) gave us a 6 month training period before sending us to our assigned departments (I was sent to their research lab arm). Training continued periodically afterwards with these short 2-3 day boot camp sort of things that you could go to, with the agreement of your boss.
That being said, at least in my case, all this training was meant to bring new grads who were clueless in certain areas (ex: in corporate etiquette) up to a basic standard. It wasn't meant to make you excel at anything.
Just speaking from my own observations here, I don't think this is unheard of in the US. For example I work for Amazon and we hire a lot of college graduates, usually after completing a paid internship. These new hires are not expected to come in with any experience outside of their university work.
From what I can tell, all the other big players do the same.
I think they're talking about something at another level of scale and formality. I worked for Amazon too, but the "training" was more "toss you into the deep end and help as needed".
Don't get me wrong, I think trial by fire is largely a fine way of training, but it is very different.
Google has an actual, formalized Noogler course that you take when you first get there. This is closer to the model of training that exists at the large Asian megacorps - but think formalized, time-off, dedicated training courses rather than the ad hoc "tap your team lead on the shoulder when you need help" model of the modern American tech industry.
Siemens now has an apprenticeship system, and I think that is similar to the mentality that the Japanese companies traditionally have had. That being said, it is a German company, and I do sincerely think that the Germans and Japanese have quite a few similarities when it comes to the way they work, the focus on quality, etc.
e: In many cases, the graduates won't actually know what they'll be doing until after they're hired. So maybe that's why there isn't a breakdown by field of work.