Comment by throwaway2037

The way it was explained to me was different... yes, all able-bodied males do national service. But there's a different phenomenon in which someone serves some years active duty (so this is not their mandatory national service, this is voluntary active duty service), in some relatively prestigious position, and then jumps ship to the corporate world, and they get hired as an executive by their ex-comrades/ex-superiors... so there ends up being a pipeline from more senior volunteer active duty military ranks into corporate executive ranks (especially at large and prestigious firms), and of course that produces a certain culture, which then tends to flow downhill

Also Israel - and their tech echo system is tier 1.

As somebody that has also done work in Korea (with on of their banks), my observation was that almost all decision making was top-down, and people were forced to do a ton of monotonous work based on the whims of upper management, and people below could not talk back. I literally stood and watched a director walk in after racking a bunch of equipment and commented that the disk arrays should be higher up. When I asked why (they were at the bottom for weight and centre of gravity reasons), he looked shocked that I even asked and tersely said that the blinking lights of the disks at eye level show the value of the purchase better.

I can't imagine writing software in that kind of environment. It'd be almost impossible to do clean work, and even if you did it'd get interfered with. On top of that nobody could go home before the boss.

I did enjoy the fact that the younger Koreans we were working with asked me and my colleague how old we were, because my colleague was 10 years older than me and they were flabbergasted that I was not deferring to him in every conversation, even though we were both equals professionally.

This was circa 2010, so maybe things are better, but oh my god I'm glad it was business trips and I was happy to be flying home each time (though my mouth still waters at the marinaded beef at the bbq restaurants I went to...).

> That means anyone "old" (over 40) and doing corp mgmt was probably also a military officer.

Absolutely not. It was very common in Germany to deny military service and instead do a year of civil service as a replacement. Also, there were several exceptions from the """mandatory""" military service. I have two brothers who had served, so all I did was tick a checkbox and I was done with the topic of military service.

Depends on if these were commissioned officers or NCOs. Basically everyone reaches NCO by the end of service (used to be automatic, now there are tests that are primarily based around fitness), but when people specifically call out officers they tend to be talking about ones with a commission. You are not becoming a commissioned officer through compulsory service.

The difference is that South Korea is currently technically still at war with North Korea.

All able bodied men don't become officers.