Six Companies, Twenty-Three Years, and the One Decision I'd Change

 

Six Companies, Twenty-Three Years, and the One Decision I'd Change

Doosan. A furniture company. LG. The same furniture company again. Ten years in food. A year in fitness equipment.

Six first days. This blog has already told you about a few of the things that happened along the way — a car I couldn't park, a song I wouldn't sing, a dinner I wasn't supposed to pay for. What it hasn't told you is what changed and what didn't, across all of it. Twenty-three years is long enough to actually see the pattern, if there is one.

There is, mostly. And then there's the one decision that still sits with me differently from the rest.

What stayed exactly the same

I expected the culture to shift company to company. It really didn't, not in the ways that mattered day to day.

The rank system — the one I wrote about a few posts back, sawon up through bujang, the whole ladder — that structure followed me everywhere. Doosan had it. The furniture company had it. LG had it, just with a glossier version of the same thing. So did a soy sauce company and, at the very end, a company that made gym equipment. Six industries with almost nothing in common as businesses, and every single one of them organised the room the same way.

Reporting worked the same too, which I didn't expect and which honestly disappointed me a little. I'd half hoped a big, modern company like LG would have solved the thing I complained about last post — lead with the conclusion, no wait, walk me through it, no wait, what's the actual conclusion. It hadn't. The stakes were higher and the decks were nicer, but the same guessing game was sitting underneath all of it.

So if there's a lesson in the "what stayed the same" column, it's this: the size of the company changes very little about how a room actually works. What changes is something else.

What changes: money, and what it costs

The real difference between the big company and the smaller ones was never culture. It was money, and what came attached to it.

The pay is better at a large company. So is the benefits package — proper healthcare, better structure, the kind of stability a smaller company usually can't match. None of that is a myth. It's real and it's worth something.

But nothing here is free, and the trade is the hours. At the larger place, the volume of work was genuinely heavier, and it followed you home in a way the smaller companies never quite managed to. I don't think this is a complaint, exactly. It's closer to an exchange rate. You get paid more, and part of what you're paid for is the fact that work doesn't reliably stop at six.

The company I left twice

I worked at the furniture company twice, which needs its own explanation, because the second time was really about something that had nothing to do with furniture at all.

The first time I left, it was for LG, and I was thrilled. A company I'd wanted to work at for a long time, the kind of name that meant something when you said it out loud. I got in and it turned out to be harder than I expected — not the culture, which I've already said barely moved, but the sheer weight of the work itself. I was in over my head more often than I'd like to admit.

Around the same time, my old company kept asking me to come back. And my first child had just been born.

I was working weekends. I was barely seeing him. I remember doing the arithmetic in my head — not about salary, for once, but about hours in a week and how many of them were actually mine — and the answer that kept coming back was: not enough. So I went back to the furniture company, for the second time, mostly so I could be around while my son was still small enough that being around actually mattered.

I don't regret that decision in the way you might expect. I got years with him that I wouldn't have had otherwise, and you don't get those years back on any schedule that suits you later.

But I'd be lying if I said it doesn't sit with me

Here's the part I don't usually say out loud, even now.

Looking back, I think about staying at LG more than I expected to. Salary matters — it matters more as the years go on, not less, and a large company's trajectory compounds in a way a smaller one's rarely does. I know exactly what that decision cost, in numbers, even now.

I don't think this means the decision was wrong. I think it means it was a real trade, the kind where both sides of the scale are heavy, and no amount of time makes one side stop mattering just because you chose the other. I got the years with my son. I also know what I gave up to get them. Both of those are true at the same time, and I've stopped expecting that feeling to resolve into a clean answer.

Six companies later

If I'm honest about what twenty-three years and six companies actually taught me, it isn't really about Korean corporate culture, even though that's mostly what I write about here. It's that the structure around you — the rank system, the reporting, the whole apparatus — barely moves no matter where you go. What moves is the trade you're making with your own time, and you mostly only see the size of that trade once you're a decade or two past making it.