I’m a New Zealander based in Seoul. This is what it has looked like from the inside, from both sides of the hiring table, and what I’d tell anyone thinking about the move.

How I got here

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My route in was a master’s in computer science at Kyung Hee University, from March 2017 to February 2019, after a BSc at Waikato and a year in network operations at a telco back home. Every semester our lab went to KSC and KCC, two domestic computing conferences. At KSC 2018 in PyeongChang the sponsors included several of Korea’s biggest tech companies, and there were recruitment booths for anyone job hunting, which is worth knowing if you’re a grad student here.

Since then:

The engineering was the familiar half. The support startup is where I learned how much of shipping software is actually operations, and the creator platform’s backend ran on more stacks than I’d choose today. The local differences sit at the edges. Naver is a search engine you have to care about: when I launched a new website for Kiwi Alumni, I did its SEO for Google and Naver both. Korean platforms crawl under names you won’t guess (Naver’s crawler is Yeti, and Kakao’s link previews come from one called kakaotalk-scrap). And Korean online banking still wants its own security software installed on your computer.

None of that is the hard part, though.

What 눈치 is, and why “optics” isn’t it

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눈치 is the sense for what other people think, want or expect, picked up from the situation rather than from anything they’ve said. 눈 means “eye”, and Euny Hong, whose 2019 book The Power of Nunchi is the best-known English introduction, translates the whole word as “eye-measure”. It turns up in a few everyday phrases. Someone who is 눈치가 빠르다 is quick to read a room. Someone who is 눈치가 없다 can’t read one at all, and it isn’t a compliment. And 눈치를 보다 is keeping an eye on how others are reacting, usually someone senior, and adjusting to stay on the right side of it.

The English word people reach for is “optics”, and it’s the wrong one. Optics is how something looks from outside, whatever it actually is: “the optics of announcing bonuses in the same week as the layoffs”. It’s about appearances, and it’s managed by whoever is being looked at. 눈치 mostly points the other way. It’s about how well you see other people, not how you look to them. The two only meet in 눈치를 보다, where you watch everyone else in order to manage how you look to them, and that’s the version that turns up in articles about Korean offices.

The examples in those articles are much the same each time: not leaving before your team lead does, the 눈치 people feel about actually taking their annual leave (연차), knowing when you’re allowed to go home from a 회식 (a team dinner), and deciding whether to contradict a senior in the meeting or quietly afterwards. Whatever you make of them, they share a shape. Each is a rule that everyone follows and nobody states.

It’s a separate problem from the language, too. Korean is in the words. 눈치 is in everything around them.

Where it shows up on a dev team

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That shape is what dev teams run on. A few months into my first management job I wrote a post about team norms that began with this: most of the friction I dealt with wasn’t technical. It was people running on different unspoken assumptions about how fast a code review should come back, what “done” actually means, and whether it’s rude to ping someone twice. I didn’t use the word then, but that list is what 눈치 reads, every line of it. Each one is a rule a team agrees on without saying, and a newcomer can only pick it up by watching.

In the same post I grumbled about new hires learning the norms “as folklore instead of hearing them explicitly during onboarding”, and about global teams assuming their baseline is everyone’s. Folklore is the best English word I’ve found for what 눈치 runs on. When you’re the foreigner on the team, yours is the baseline that’s off, and the folklore isn’t written down anywhere you could read it.

The standup is where it costs the most. In 2023 I wrote about a project I was leading that fell behind while I waited for someone to ask about it. Someone finally did, three weeks later, and by then it was a disaster. Good 눈치 doesn’t fix that. Reading the room tells you what nobody wants to hear; it doesn’t tell you to say it anyway. The habit I took away is the opposite of waiting. Say it first, in writing, before anyone asks: “This is taking longer than I thought. Now looking at 8–10 days instead of 5. Want me to cut scope or push the deadline?”

When you’re the one being read

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In February 2024 I started managing an engineering team at a Seoul software company, and 눈치 turned round. As a developer I’d been the one reading the room. As the manager, I was the room. What I said in a meeting, what I didn’t, how quickly I replied and what time I went home were all things other people could now read.

A lot of what I’d written as a project lead applies with more force once you’re the manager. If people don’t feel safe telling you what’s broken, you’ll be the last person to find out. Sit on information too long and people can sense it, and the rumour mill fills whatever silence you leave. “I don’t know” feels like failure when five people in a meeting are waiting on your answer, which is exactly why it’s worth saying. And the line I keep coming back to: people can’t read your intent, only your words. In a team that runs on 눈치 they’ll try anyway, from your face, from what you skip and from when you leave, which is a good reason to give them less to guess.

What I leaned on was unglamorous. One-on-ones with everyone, kept about the person rather than the sprint, with the plain question that does most of the work: “Is there anything you need from me or the team to help with your tasks?”

A short list of team norms, three to five of them, written where everyone could see them, including what happens when the manager breaks one. Going to ask the people who will never speak up in a room of eight, instead of waiting for them to. And an honest “no, and here’s why” in place of a “we’ll see” that never comes up again, because a vague answer is just one more thing to read the room for. A month in, the product team’s outing started at a café with a workshop on each other’s values and team norms, which is about as direct an answer to 눈치 as a company can give: a morning spent saying out loud the things that usually go unsaid.

Being hired as a foreigner

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I don’t have a recruiting playbook for Korea. What I have is the hiring manager’s side of it, and the advice that falls out of that is 눈치 pointed at the employer before you sign.

When I was hiring as a manager, the developers I most wanted were never on the job boards, and founders, as I’ve written before, would much rather hire someone they’ve already worked with. So the best way in is anything that lets people see you work first. An internship at a small company has a habit of quietly turning into a job offer. A hackathon gives you a whole weekend of it: in 2023 I was on a team of four that won the Seoul Tech Impact Hackathon, hosted by Lunit Global, with an app for finding street food vendors, who in Korea don’t have addresses.

Then there’s the coffee chat. I wrote that how someone behaves in a relaxed conversation tells you more about working with them than a rehearsed interview ever will, and that it runs both ways. For a candidate it’s the one chance to read a team before you’re inside it. The questions I’d ask from the candidate’s chair: what’s the biggest challenge the team is facing right now, why did you join and what’s kept you here, and what’s something about working here that might surprise me. That last one is a polite way of asking for the 눈치 up front. Evasive answers about turnover or direction tell you plenty on their own.

If you’re hiring a foreign developer

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If you run a team in Korea and you’re hiring a developer from somewhere else, the most useful thing you can do is the phrase from that norms post: make the implicit explicit. Don’t leave them to learn your rules as folklore. Tell them in the first week how fast reviews are expected back, what “done” means, whether a second ping is rude, what time people actually go home, and whether taking leave involves anything beyond the form. The last two are the classic 눈치 questions, the ones nobody inside the team thinks to say.

After that it’s the boring habits that leave less to read. Tell people before they ask; a Friday email to stakeholders with three bullets (what shipped, what’s next, anything you’re worried about) takes ten minutes. Ask the quiet ones directly rather than waiting for them in the meeting. Give real answers, “no” included, with the reason attached. And interview every candidate with the same questions against the same rubric. That one took me a while to learn, but it’s the only fair way to compare people; otherwise you end up favouring whoever you spoke to most recently. It also means the candidate who doesn’t know your team’s unspoken rules gets asked exactly what the one who does gets asked.

The New Zealand community here

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In 2018, while I was still a student, I took the photos at a Kiwi Chamber leadership breakfast, and wrote afterwards that I really enjoy volunteering for events that promote the relationship between the two countries. Since January 2020 I’ve chaired Kiwi Alumni, a community for New Zealanders in Korea and for people who studied in New Zealand and now live and work here. It’s a volunteer role, and mostly people work: organising events and building relationships with the New Zealand Embassy and education institutions, plus unglamorous jobs like a new logo and a website members can actually find things on. In 2023 we ran Kiwi Alumni Night with the Embassy, and it ended up on KTV.

What I wrote after that night is the nearest thing this post has to a thesis. People who’ve lived in both Korea and New Zealand understand how to bridge the differences, because they’ve experienced both cultures. If you’re coming here to work, find those people, wherever you’re from. They’re the ones who’ll tell you in plain words what the room was saying.

Freelancing from Seoul

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I went freelance in October 2025, after leaving the manager’s job. In practice that’s contract DevOps and MLOps work, mostly on-premise: a high-availability PostgreSQL cluster, then serving infrastructure for LLMs on the same hardware. More of it has turned out to be quality control than plumbing, watching traces and multi-turn conversations to find where model output drifts. Since February 2026 I’ve also been building a marketplace and community app of my own, on the side.

Freelancing doesn’t get you out of 눈치; it changes what you read. The first thing I look at anywhere I land is the monitoring, because it tells you more about a team than the README does. That’s 눈치 for systems: reading what a team actually does rather than what it says it does.

What I’d tell someone considering it

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1. Come in through a door where people see you work before they hire you. Mine was a master’s. A hackathon, an internship at a small company or your own country’s community here do the same job, and the community is where you’ll find the people who’ve lived on both sides.
2. Don’t rule out small companies; most of my career has been at them. At a ten-person company there’s nobody to hand the boring work to, and what you build actually goes live.
3. Read the team before you join. Use the coffee chat, ask what would surprise you about working there, and take evasive answers about turnover seriously.
4. Don’t wait to be asked. A slipping estimate, a risky change, a decision someone else depends on: say it first, in writing.
5. Ask for the unwritten rules out loud: how fast reviews come back, what “done” means, whether a second ping is rude. If nobody has written them down, offer to.
6. Learn the stack around your stack. Naver and Kakao matter here in ways your Google habits won’t cover.

The engineering is the half you can prepare for before you arrive. 눈치 is the half you learn on the job, and the quickest way I know to learn it is to ask people to say the quiet part out loud, and to say yours first.

On the way I sat beside the chief of staff, and we talked about finding hobbies. We agreed that when life is this busy, it’s hard to find a hobby you can enjoy on your own. On this topic, we discussed our university life. Interestingly, she was an artist and enjoyed making 3D art. But the constant demand to make art didn’t seem to match her lifestyle, as she explained. So, I jokingly suggested that she make a piece for our somewhat sterile office environment. Haha

We arrived at the cafe and immediately found a table large enough for all of us. It was great to be able to talk about the things that matter to us.

Furthermore, everyone was very respectful of one another’s opinions, and the CEO and moderator kindly led the event to ensure we finished on time for our next activity.

The next activity was a visit to a whisky distillery! I am a keen whisky drinker, and this was the perfect opportunity to show my somewhat greater-than-average knowledge of the process of making whisky and tasting it. The tour guide took on the challenge of explaining the distillery in English and Korean. We first looked at the process of adding the wheat to the vat and soaking it to extract the sugars. Afterwards, we also got to see the product after it had been fermented for approximately a couple of days. Lastly, we saw the still, which was described as looking like a giant chocolate drop. Inside, it was approximately 30 degrees, so it was very relieving when the tour guide asked us to go outside to see the storage buildings.

The barrels were stacked to the roof with various kinds of wood. Some of the ends of the barrels were labelled with Gochujang, which was a Korean-inspired fusion. We were even given the chance to try the whisky straight from the barrel, which is approximately 60% alcohol by volume! Everybody’s throats were on fire!

To finish up, we had the chance to try their final products, whiskies aged in different barrels. We also got to try their gin, which in hindsight was a mistake: it had a strong mushroomy note.

To wrap up the day, we travelled back to Seoul in the van, found a bar and had a few quiet ones together before everyone went back to their homes. We did so much in one day, and I think we learned a lot about each other while enjoying the activities together!

If you are ever looking for a workplace in Korea, reach out to me!