Our tour of NAVER is probably the most enlightening experience I have had personally while in Korea. For those who are unaware, NAVER is a Korean company that acts rather similarly to Google exclusively in the Korean market; in short, it is a search engine. Given that I was able to visit Google, both in Pittsburgh and in Dublin, my visit to NAVER was a sort of cultural juxtaposition that caught me off guard in how overt it was. On the surface, these are both large platforms with a lot in common; the deeper you dig, however, the more different the two become.

Google has the unsettling feeling of being a cult that inspires individualism. Their employees are fear the name of Google like they fear the name of God, but lucky for them, their omnipotent overlord of an employer allows them the freedom to be themselves. I am not exaggerating, nor am I being disrespectful; that is the only way to describe that particular employee-employer relationship. Managers will tell their employees things like, “work whatever hours you want, this project doesn’t really have a deadline,” encouraging individual freedom, yet the workers will stay and work absurdly long hours with the understanding that, beneath the ‘Googly’ facade, there is plenty of wrathful vengeance to be had. 

NAVER, however, was quite overt about its collective outlook and its stoicism. The colorful offices of Google are replaced with dark stone and muted wood panelling. People dress largely the same, as opposed to with wild variation. There are no absurdly expensive vanity projects, such as the ‘Google Gong’ in the Pittsburgh offices. Really, the whole juxtaposition is just a microcosm of the differences in individualism and collectivism between America and Korea, which to me, have been the most shocking of any cultural differences. Being that this was our last company visit in Seoul, I’m glad it presented me with such a cool contrast of workplaces.