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I suppose we've had different experiences. I think virtually everyone would like to leave earlier, but the point is that they also don't want to disappoint. I

I suppose we've had different experiences. I think virtually everyone would like to leave earlier, but the point is that they also don't want to disappoint. In my experience, it's not about kacho watching over them -- they'd still be there if kacho went home (and I've personally seen that the few times kacho went home early). The kacho is only there to be loyal to the workers -- he wants to leave too. Or at the very least he wants to go out for a drink. There definitely are people watching the clock and desperately trying to look busy while doing nothing, but again my experienced is that those people are pretty much despised by everybody else on the floor. There is a ton of work to be done. I only ever worked at the one school, but I have a really hard time believing that my school had exceptional workers. In fact, it was ranked near the bottom and was the place that problem teacher were sent in order to improve. We could argue about this forever I suppose. I don't disagree that the work methodology is needlessly inefficient, but I strongly disagree that your first sentence is true. The work culture here is different and everybody participates in it. There are parts of the work culture here I miss now that I'm working remotely for a UK company -- especially the dedication to working as a team.

yrsong 9y ago
I was born and raised in South Korea, and I have multiple years' worth of work experience in my home country. While I do agree that this argument could most definitely go both ways, I do think that 67% of workers opting to stay longer goes on to show just how prevalent the concept of "face-timing" at work really is in my country, regardless of which profession you work in. I can personally attest to many nights - more than majority of my work days, in fact - where I've found myself and my teammates working (or pretending to, at least) late into the night, just because my manager gave no signs of leaving anytime soon. Unlike here in the States, individualism is not a value that society values; rather, it's essentially frowned upon. Confucianism manifests itself in modern society by being extended into the workplace; the idea of "we're all in this together" is almost forced upon workers, even in situations where it's clearly more of an individual thing. When your manager is working up until 10PM, I don't think a lot of Koreans would find it easy to leave work at 7PM, even when the work that's been allocated to her/him has been done.

yrsong 9y ago

I was born and raised in South Korea, and I have multiple years' worth of work experience in my home country. While I do agree that this argument could most definitely go both ways, I do think that 67% of workers opting to stay longer goes on to show just how prevalent the concept of "face-timing" at work really is in my country, regardless of which profession you work in. I can personally attest to many nights - more than majority of my work days, in fact - where I've found myself and my teammates working (or pretending to, at least) late into the night, just because my manager gave no signs of leaving anytime soon. Unlike here in the States, individualism is not a value that society values; rather, it's essentially frowned upon. Confucianism manifests itself in modern society by being extended into the workplace; the idea of "we're all in this together" is almost forced upon workers, even in situations where it's clearly more of an individual thing. When your manager is working up until 10PM, I don't think a lot of Koreans would find it easy to leave work at 7PM, even when the work that's been allocated to her/him has been done.