I’ve spent about 7 years doing infrastructure work in Korea. I want to describe the structure, not just complain, because I think people outside Korea have a specific mental image of “Korean tech” that doesn’t match what most of the industry actually is.
The staffing math
I worked at two of the largest university hospitals in Seoul, part of the same network. One site had 12 people running infrastructure. The other had 2. Same organization, comparable patient volume. I was one of the 2.
This is a hospital. Imaging systems, records, network. Two people.
The security officer at one site had less practical knowledge than a first-year CS student. That’s not me being cruel — I mean the role was filled because it had to be filled, by whoever was available. At another site, a server administrator was hired straight from an operations job at a different company with no server background, because there was no one else.
The hours
At my first company I worked roughly 15-hour days. Not during a crunch — as the baseline. I skipped lunch most days because there was no coverage. Over one year I took 3 days off. Unused leave in Korea is legally supposed to be paid out if you can’t take it. I received nothing, in time or in money.
Later, at the Korean office of a US insurance company — an S&P 500 firm, the kind of place people assume has real standards — I was the only person on my team still working 15-hour days. I left.
The injury
One PM decided that all password resets for the entire company should route through me. Manually. Every one. I eventually had surgery on my right index finger for trigger finger.
Why it stays this way
The dispatch model. Most Korean developers and sysadmins don’t work at the company whose systems they maintain. You’re employed by a vendor, and you sit at the client’s office as an on-site resource. Your employer bills your day rate; you get a fraction. There are often 2–4 layers between the budget and the person doing the work.
Because you’re not the client’s employee, no one owns your training. I was never given any onboarding. When I asked, the answers were consistent enough that I can quote them almost verbatim:
- “That’s just how it is.”
- “There are plenty of people who’d take your job.”
- “You came here because nowhere else would take you, right?”
- “I don’t know. How would I know if nobody taught me?”
That last one is the one that stays with me, because it was said by the person managing me.
What I’m actually saying
Not that everyone I worked with was incompetent. That the structure guarantees this outcome. When headcount is set by budget rather than by system load, when the person on-site has no institutional owner, and when seniority rather than capability determines who holds a technical role, you get a hospital running on 2 people and a manager who can’t explain what DNS does.
I’m still in the industry. I’m currently looking to move. I’m writing this because “Korea is technologically advanced” and “Korean IT is a good place to work” get treated as the same statement, and they are not.
submitted by /u/AideCold2451
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