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.

Cultures coming together

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We organised Kiwi Alumni Night 2023 in collaboration with the New Zealand Embassy in Seoul, at the New Zealand Ambassador’s residence. The event brought together people who studied in New Zealand and now live and work in South Korea.

Friendship

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The evening was a great mix of catching up with old friends and meeting new people who share a connection to both countries.

Wearing the chairperson hat

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As the organiser, it was rewarding to see the turnout. People who’ve lived in both Korea and New Zealand bring an interesting perspective—they’ve experienced both cultures and understand how to bridge the differences.

Cultural Experience

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We were also treated to a cultural performance from three artists:

• Calligraphy artist Lucia Choi
• Gayageum musician Siyoon Lee
• Percussionist Shinui Kang

Between them they wove Korean and New Zealand culture together beautifully.

The Kiwi Alumni Team

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Supporters

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The Kiwi Alumni Night 2023 event was made possible with the support of various organizations and sponsors, including:

• New Zealand Embassy
• Cathay Pacific
• Kiwi Chamber
• Fonterra
• The University of Auckland
• Education New Zealand
• MOZZIE
• Doggo Dentist
• Queenstown - Coffee and Kitchen
• Bonnie’s Pizza
• Studio KJD (금준당)
• Spoiled
• Eun Pie
• ANZA
• Lucia Choi and Siyoon Lee

Thank you to everyone who came, and to the sponsors and supporters who made Kiwi Alumni Night 2023 one to remember. It was a good night — looking forward to doing it again.

For anyone who landed here wondering: Stone Island isn’t a Korean brand. It’s Italian, founded by Massimo Osti in 1982 and part of Moncler since 2021, but it has had a following in Korea for a long time; the speakers put it at 25 years.

The badge does most of the talking

There’s no other motif in fashion quite like the Stone Island badge, and the brand knows it. One thing I didn’t know: it’s placed where it sits closest to the heart, which sounds like marketing until a designer says it to you with a straight face. It’s also detachable, if you’d rather keep things quiet.

Really, the badge is a membership card. Putting on a Stone Island piece is less about the garment and more about joining a club — belonging comes first, the jacket second. That’s the whole model.

Details I wouldn’t have noticed on my own

When a man tries on a jacket, he checks the pockets first, then looks in the mirror. Stone Island designs around exactly that sequence. I’ve done it in that order my whole life and never once thought about it.

The cuts work just as well on women, too — they were doing genuinely gender-neutral pieces before it was a talking point.

The best story of the night was a letter from a collector in Milan who put himself through university by selling off his Stone Island collection. And the Korean connection runs deeper than I’d assumed: the brand has been here 25 years, and the speakers talked about Korean collectors as friends rather than customers. Their theory is that Italy and Korea overlap culturally more than you’d expect — music, opera, football.

Fabric first

The name, it turns out, came from two common words pulled out of books: stone, island. No research, no agonising. I quite like that.

The designs come from a proper team with people from all over, not a lone genius. But the thing the talk kept circling back to was fabric. Composition, how it dyes, how it can be treated, how it stretches. They call it doing “real” research: run the experiment, get it wrong, and occasionally watch a mistake turn into next season’s success. The next round of that research is apparently green — recycled materials and a hard look at water usage.

My takeaway is dull but useful: be obsessive about the material and boringly consistent about the identity, for decades. It works for jackets. I suspect it works for software too.

One of my favourite cafés in Korea wanted to grow its business by being more visible online. One way to lift a brand there is professional photos of the menu, much as big brands hire food stylists to shoot theirs.

This post walks through how I photographed the coffee: setting up and positioning the lights in the café, choosing the camera and flash settings, timing the shot, and finally post-processing to clean up the bright spots the flashes leave behind.

The short version, if you’re after food photography tips:

• Use a long focal length (200mm here) to flatten the picture, so the glass doesn’t look stretched.
• Don’t rely on the flash on the camera alone; put a second one above the subject.
• Use a fast shutter speed (1/640s) so the flash lights the drink and the ambient light, and the background with it, drops away. Above the camera’s flash sync speed that needs high-speed sync.
• Stop down to around f/6.3 so the whole glass, front to back, is in focus.
• Clean up the flash’s hot spots afterwards in Photoshop.

Equipment

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Godox TT350 speedlights

A Sony A6000 with the SEL70200F4 (70-200mm f/4), which works out at 105-300mm in 35mm-equivalent terms on the A6000’s APS-C sensor.

Light Positioning

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Master (Light One)

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On the camera’s hot shoe.

Slave (Light Two)

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On a monopod above the subject, as in the diagram.

Why speedlights

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• A faster shutter speed means sharper pictures, which matters most when there’s no tripod to hold the camera.
• Without high-speed sync (HSS), a flash only works properly up to the camera’s sync speed, which is 1/160s on the A6000. The TT350 supports HSS, which is what makes 1/640s possible with flash.

Camera Settings

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200mm

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A long focal length flattens the picture and takes away the stretched look a glass gets when you shoot it from close up.

ISO 800

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Low enough to keep the image clean, while still giving enough exposure.

1/640s

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At a fast shutter speed, whatever the flash lights up shows clearly and everything behind it goes dark, because the ambient light barely registers.

f/6.3

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A higher f-number gives more depth of field, so everything from the nearest point of the glass to the far rim is in focus.

Post-processing

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Photoshop

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Flash on glass leaves hot spots. I cleaned them up with the Healing Brush set to Darken mode, which only darkens pixels that are brighter than the area you sample, so the glare goes and the rest is left alone. The video below covers removing hot spots.

Final Image

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Gwangbokjeol (광복절), on 15 August, is Korea’s National Liberation Day, marking the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Zdog is a small JavaScript library for drawing 3D-ish illustrations on a <canvas> or in SVG. Its shapes have real positions in 3D space and turn like 3D objects, but they’re drawn as flat shapes, so you get something that looks like a flat illustration you can spin rather than a 3D render. That suits something simple like a flag.

A minimal Zdog example

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Two shapes, drag to rotate, and an animation loop:

<canvas class="zdog-canvas" width="240" height="240"></canvas>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/zdog@1/dist/zdog.dist.min.js"></script>
<script>
  const illo = new Zdog.Illustration({
    element: '.zdog-canvas',
    dragRotate: true, // drag to turn the scene
  });

  // a square, pushed back
  new Zdog.Rect({
    addTo: illo,
    width: 80,
    height: 80,
    translate: { z: -30 },
    stroke: 8,
    color: '#0047a0',
  });

  // a filled circle, pulled forward
  new Zdog.Ellipse({
    addTo: illo,
    diameter: 60,
    translate: { z: 30 },
    stroke: 8,
    color: '#cd2e3a',
    fill: true,
  });

  function animate() {
    illo.rotate.y += 0.02;
    illo.updateRenderGraph();
    requestAnimationFrame(animate);
  }
  animate();
</script>

Each shape joins the scene with addTo, and translate.z is what makes it 3D: turn the scene and the circle swings round in front of the square. updateRenderGraph() updates and redraws everything, which is why it sits inside the loop.

Official Docs

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https://zzz.dog/

The code used is available to view on CodePen.

My Example

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About KSC 2018

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KSC is organised by the Korea Information Science Society (한국정보과학회, KIISE), which runs two of these general conferences a year: KCC, the Korea Computer Congress (한국컴퓨터종합학술대회), in summer, and KSC in winter. Between them they’re the big annual gatherings for computer science researchers in Korea. Papers and keynotes are the official reason to go; catching up with people from other labs is the unofficial one.

This year’s run was three days and two nights at Phoenix Park. The conference chair was Han Jeong-hyeon (Korea University), with Kim Hyeong-seok (Konkuk University) as program chair and Han Moon-seok (Gangneung-Wonju National University) as organising chair. Sponsors included Samsung Electronics, the Gangwon Convention Bureau, LINE Plus, Kakao, Kookmin University’s College of Software Convergence, NAVER, Manycore Soft, and Signtel.

What was on

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The program had paper presentations across the usual CS domains, keynotes and invited lectures, tutorials, and workshops and special sessions — some introducing large-scale national research projects. There was also a LINE X KIISE blockchain competition, an SW implementation/demo competition where undergrads and grad students show off what they’ve built, and exhibition and recruitment booths for anyone job hunting. Accepted papers are published in the conference proceedings (논문집), and the top 10% of accepted papers and presentations get recommended for journal publication, which is a decent carrot.

For a grad student, the real value is seeing what every other lab in the country is working on, all in one place. And snowy PyeongChang is not a bad spot to do it.

The official KSC 2018 website is here.

Dementia Care Robots

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Professor Kim, a neurology expert, gave a lecture on “Dementia Care Robots,” including the daily life support function of caring robots to assist dementia patients at home. She talked about robots that can continuously train to enhance recognition capabilities and cognitive training programs that utilize them. She is also co-developing robots designed to care for dementia patients in homes, with support from the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy. The robots developed in this project will undergo evaluation for effectiveness in 2019 and will be operated upon successful completion, leading to the development of dementia-care robots for households.

Uniservices

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Dr Medrano-Gracia introduced his role within Uniservices as the Business Development Manager. They have partnered with the best minds at the University of Auckland to apply intelligent thinking to ideas that have the potential to change the world.

Upstarters

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New Ideas From A New Place

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If necessity is the mother of invention, it’s no surprise that world-changing ideas are born in New Zealand. Introducing the New Zealand Tech & Innovation Story.

One of the examples on screen was Dotterel’s lightweight drone shroud, made with Revolution Fibres’ acoustic nanofibre to make drones whisper-quiet.

Photos taken at the event

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I really enjoy volunteering for events with the goal of promoting the relationship between the two countries.

For dark rooms, it’s important to bring a fast lens! Imagine how distracting it is for the audience and speaker if you are trying to compensate for the light by using a large flash! It simply isn’t a good look!