People apply for the company, not for the job

In United States, at least for engineering jobs, most people apply for the job. It is also employer's vested interest to hire the right person for the job. Matching the skill set with the right project is very important for both parties.

In Korea, it seems that we have a completely different culture. Most new hires don't even know which team they will work for until the day that they get assigned to a team. What's more shocking is that they don't even know to which location they will be asked ( in this case, told) to relocate until spending a significant amount of time for the company orientation program. Orientation programs are different for different companies but they usually require new hires to spend more than one week at a training center without going home.

The fact is that people in Korea apply for the company, not for the job. This is a very interesting concept (this is more true for the big companies). For a lot of people, the name value of their employers is more important than the kind of work they will be doing for them (this is also true when it comes to choosing the university) Most people here will probably choose the company with a big name than a small company even if the small company is willing you pay a bit more and willing to let you work on a project that would excite you.

The implication here is that it is very difficult for a team to ask for a new help whose skill sets match the needs. Since the HR folks without sufficient engineering background make hiring decisions based on some test scores (yes, many big companies have their own entrance exams) and appropriate them to teams, the vicious circle is inevitable. For example, it is not uncommon to see guys with electrical engineering backgrounds with maybe one semester introductory programming course assigned to a software development team.

In conclusion, you shouldn't be surprised even if your HR person can't provide you with the job description when you apply for a job in Korea. The chances are your HR person probably don't even know, because they will have to figure out which team you will be assigned to first.

Why do they need to know?

It has been about 1 1/2 year since I started working in Korea. I still find it difficult to convince my colleagues that "sharing" is important. That is, it is crucial that the team members talk about what is going on with whatever they are doing.

While we have many meetings, it is not unusual to see most of the participants (it is almost an inappropriate choice of vocabulary since the majority of them do not even say anything) keep their mouth shut and only respond to questions directly addressed to them. If you ask how things are going, the usual response is "there is no issue." Why is it so difficult to hear something like "I was working on trying to fix an issue we found a week ago and we tried method a, b, c, and d and d seems to be the promising solution??"

Another thing mind-boggling is the attitude "why do they need to know?" A lot of people here still believe that the top-down command chain works better than collaboration based on horizontal communication. However, many veterans in software engineering have more than enough to say the top-down command is just disastrous for work that involve creativity. Is this ever going to get better?