Aisle 7, Seoul

  The Invisible Line Between Contract and Permanent There's a Korean drama — My Mister, one of the good ones — where the lead actress is on a contract position the whole way through. If you've watched it, you already have a decent instinct for what this post is about. If you haven't, the short version is that her situation gets treated, quietly and constantly, as different from everyone permanent around her, even when nobody says so out loud. I've never been the one on that side of the line. What I have done, a few times, is sit on the other side of the desk and decide whether someone gets to cross it. What actually separates them The obvious difference is pay, and it's real — a contract position pays less for what is often the identical job, sitting at the identical desk. What surprises people, I think, is what doesn't differ. Benefits, mostly, are the same regardless. Health coverage, the basic package — that line isn't where the gap sits. The real gap is ...

I Never Once Had the Time and the Money at the Same Time There's a version of this post that's just a list. Which of my six companies had the worst overtime, which had the best. That version exists somewhere in my head and it isn't very interesting. The actual pattern is stranger than a ranking, and I only noticed it by putting two very different jobs next to each other. Staying late because the room stayed late Early on — this would have been the early 2000s, at the start of all this — a good amount of the overtime I did wasn't really about workload. It was about the room. If your team was still at their desks, you were still at your desk, whether or not there was anything left on yours to actually do. Nobody wrote that rule down. Everyone followed it anyway. That thinned out over the years, and by the time I was further into my career the picture had mostly separated into two honest categories: places where the hours were long because there was genuinely a lot of work...

  Big Company, Small Company: What Actually Changes and What Doesn't Six companies. Two of them — Doosan and LG — count as what people here call daegieop, the big conglomerate-adjacent kind. The other four are what gets called jungsogieop, small and medium enterprises, even though "small" is doing a lot of work in that phrase; a furniture company or a soy sauce company with hundreds of employees is not exactly small. People ask me which is better, as if there's one answer. There isn't. But having sat on both sides of that line more than once, I can at least tell you where the real difference sits, because it isn't where most people assume it is. Where the gap actually opens up Pay and benefits. That's it, mostly. That's where the real, measurable gap lives. I've already written about what LG's holiday gift looked like next to a furniture company's department store voucher, and that gap runs straight through everything else — salary, healthc...

  What "Sales Planning" Actually Means, and Why It Made Me Everyone's Least Favourite Call When people outside Korea hear "sales," they picture one thing. Someone in a room with a customer, closing a deal, shaking hands. That is a real job and I've written about the people who do it — the ones who go collect the money, who sit across from a dealer who can't pay, who buy dinner they weren't supposed to buy. That was never actually my job. I sat one level back from all of it, in a role that doesn't have a clean English name. The closest is sales planning, sometimes sales support. What it actually meant, most days, was being the person nobody on the sales floor was ever happy to hear from. What the job actually was If I had to put it in one sentence: my job was to make sure the sales team could sell, and then check whether they had. That split into pieces that don't sound like each other at all. Pulling apart the numbers to see where the busines...

  What a Korean Company Gives You Twice a Year Twice a year, around Chuseok in autumn and Seollal in late winter, something changes at every Korean company I have ever worked for. Not the work itself. The work keeps going right up until it stops. What changes is that a gift shows up. Everyone gets one. Junior staff, senior staff, the same box handed down the same line, more or less. What's inside that box, though, turned out to say more about each company than almost anything else I could point to. Five companies, five boxes At the furniture company, it was department store vouchers. Emart, specifically — a set amount, spend it on whatever you needed for the holiday table, and nobody thought twice about it. LG did it differently, and the difference told you something about the company before you even opened anything. You picked your own gift from a list. A real list, with real options, and the value was noticeably higher than what I'd seen elsewhere. It wasn't flashy about ...

  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,...

  There Is No Right Way to Give a Report, and I Never Found One People ask what Korean workplace reporting culture is like, expecting a system. A format. Something you could write down and follow. I worked at six companies over twenty-three years. I never found the system. What I found instead was that the same report could be wrong in opposite directions on two consecutive days, from the same person. The instruction that isn't one Here is the one that got me every time, at every company, in every decade. You go in, you ask how to approach something, and you're told: do it this way. Plan A. So you go away and you build Plan A, properly, the way you were told to build it, and you bring it back. Why did you do it this way? You were told to. That's not really an answer you can give out loud, even though it's the true one. So you stand there and you explain the reasoning behind Plan A, which you didn't choose, as if it were your own idea, because at that point defending...