The last two years and a half in Korea were wild. Living in Seoul, which is the most vibrant city I’ve ever lived in, was such a unique experience. You’d almost never run out of things to do or visit. There has been no single stay-at-home order or lockdown since the pandemic started, so I had a fair chance to explore the city. I truly enjoyed every bit of the city and I often told my friends that Seoul finally feels like home to me. However, I ended up returning to Toronto for work.
I worked at four different companies while I was in Korea; some are considered big tech companies and others are mid-sized (200+ employees). My work in Korea was similar to what I did in Canada. It’s probably the same in other parts of the world. You’d write code, test your changes, deploy on production, and repeat. Programming languages, frameworks, and developer tools are also the same. When it comes to non-technical aspects, the companies had similarities that I found a bit odd. These similarities have eventually led me to reverse-reverse-immigrate to Canada.
One of the common denominators is that there was no structure for guiding an employee through career growth. You’d just have to keep working on projects to gain experience and to be given a senior role later. It was extremely difficult to figure out what is expected of me, which career path I can take, and what I can improve other than technical skills. As I became interested in the engineering manager track, I began to seek ways to learn skills required for such a role. I wasn’t sure how the transition would take place, so I tried to find out what needs to be done in order to grow myself as a manager. The problem was that no one had a concrete list of checkboxes that need to be filled before promoting an engineer to a manager (or no one shared it with me).
My confusion was exacerbated by the lack of effective 1-on-1s. To be fair, only the last company at which I worked in Korea has a culture that encourages 1-on-1s even though I wouldn’t say all meetings were effective. Some of the companies didn’t even have a regular 1-on-1 in place. I’ve always thought it’s a crucial part of the job that allows me to exchange feedbacks regularly and discuss goals in my career. It was disappointing to see that 1-on-1s are not regarded as useful nor are they incorporated in daily work.
Some of you might have heard of a phrase “you should either learn or earn”. In the first year in Korea, I learned a ton in the most fast-paced environment I’ve ever been in. Leaving aside notoriously long work hours, the experience taught me how to become a competent developer on a team that is eager to move fast. Unfortunately, since I joined different companies, I felt like I was gaining experience without learning much. Feedbacks were not helpful either because they just reiterated what I was already doing at the moment. Building up experience is definitely a plus, but you can do this anywhere in the world. There was no compelling reason for me to keep working in Seoul. Besides, the average salary of a senior software engineer in Korea is way much less than that in North America (although numbers vary depending on companies and cities, the cost of living in Seoul is similar to that in Toronto except rental costs). Frankly speaking, I was neither learning nor earning.
I spent more than a year contemplating between settling in Korea and moving back to Canada. There were other factors I had to consider to choose between the two paths, but the final decision came down to what I mentioned above. It was worth exploring my options as I was able to find which environment fits better. I would have not known what it’s like to work as a software developer in Korea and what I value the most in a career if I had stayed in Canada two years ago. Despite difficulties of crossing the border twice, I’m glad to be back in Toronto and to start another chapter in my life.
