Aisle 7, Seoul

  I quit a job in Seoul because of a commute that took close to four hours a day, and because I live with panic disorder. A long commute can be a real reason to leave a job, and in my case it was the deciding one. Here is what the numbers looked like, what it did to me, and what I'd check before accepting a job with a long trip. How long was my commute, really? At the fitness equipment company, getting to work took about an hour and a half each way. Plenty of people in the Seoul area live with numbers like that, and for a while I did too. The trip home was the part I hadn't priced in properly. The work there was heavy, so I'd often be at my desk well into the night, and by the time I left, the transport on my route ran far enough apart that the ride back stretched toward two hours. Add the two directions together and it came to close to four hours a day in transit. Then add the rest of the day around it. I was out of the house before seven in the morning, and on a night wit...

  Older Than Me, and Reporting to Me I've already written about how a Korean office runs on two separate ladders that don't always line up — rank on paper, and age in the room. Most of the time that mismatch is background noise. Twice in my career it became the main thing, once on each side of it. The chajang who was seven years older than me At one company, I was bujang and team leader. On my team was a chajang — one rank below me — who happened to be seven years older than I was. He was good at his job. Genuinely diligent, the kind of person who did the work without needing to be chased, and he'd made a decision at some point before I ever became his team leader: he'd stopped chasing further promotion. I don't know exactly when he made peace with that, or what it cost him to make peace with it, but by the time I was his boss, he'd clearly already settled into where he was. Being his team leader was not always comfortable. There's an asymmetry baked into a ...

  The Season When Everyone Suddenly Becomes a Rumour Mill There's a stretch of a few weeks, once a year, when a Korean office turns into something else entirely. The work doesn't stop, but it stops being the main thing anyone is actually thinking about. Promotion and reassignment season does that. Everybody already half-knows who's up this year, and nobody actually knows, and that gap is where all the talk lives. Who gets picked, and why it isn't always who you'd guess Here's something I noticed early and never stopped noticing. The person who's clearly good at the job — the one who actually carries the numbers, the one everyone quietly relies on — doesn't automatically get the promotion. Sometimes that person waits years longer than you'd expect, while someone else moves past them. Once you get to a mid-size company or bigger, there's a reason for this that nobody puts in writing but everyone understands. You need a line. Not a job title, a line...

  The Number Nobody Writes Down, and It Hasn't Moved in Twenty Years There's a rule in a Korean office that nobody hands you on your first day. Nobody puts it in an employee handbook. You just absorb it, usually the first time a wedding invitation goes around the team and you watch what everyone else puts in the envelope before you decide what to put in yours. The rule, for me, across every company, was almost embarrassingly simple. As a regular team member, fifty thousand won. Once I became a team leader, a hundred thousand. That's it. That's the whole system. A rule with no document behind it I've already written about how rank in a Korean office gets spoken out loud constantly — the ladder, the titles, who outranks whom by exactly how much. The cash-gift amount is the same logic, just quieter and more literal. Your position doesn't just tell you where you sit in a meeting. It tells you what number goes in the envelope. Nobody announces the figure. You learn i...

  The Real Reason and the Reason You're Allowed to Give Four job changes in twenty-three years. In some countries that's nothing. Here, people hear "four" and their eyebrows go up slightly, like you've admitted to something. I've had recruiters ask about it almost apologetically, as if they already know the number makes me look restless. I don't think it does. I think it means I figured something out a bit earlier than most people do. The question that's really always the same question Every interview I've ever sat through in Korea, across four moves and probably a dozen interviews that didn't go anywhere, has come down to one question dressed up in slightly different words each time. Why are you leaving your current company. Why do you want to leave. What made you decide now. It's always some version of that, and here's the part that took me a while to fully understand: everyone in the room already knows the honest answer, most of the ...

  The Question You Didn't Prepare For I've already written about how nobody ever gave me a stable rule for reporting — lead with the conclusion, no wait, walk me through it first. That was one kind of stress. This is a different one, and it never really went away no matter how many years I put in. It's the moment in a report to a vice president, or any senior executive really, when the question that comes back isn't the one you built your slides around. You can prepare for the questions you expect Most of a report is not the report itself. It's the night before, or several nights before, trying to guess what will get asked. I always did this alone. Not with the team, not with a junior colleague reading questions off a list at me — just me, going through the deck line by line, asking myself where I would attack it if I were the one sitting across the table. Where are the numbers soft. Where did I make an assumption I can't fully defend. Where is the gap between w...