life turns on a dime

[Originally posted on July 30, 2018, 4:39 p.m.]

In Korea, big, sudden events can occur with little to no warning. This puts the average expat in a position of being simultaneously surprised and unsurprised: surprised because this particular event is unexpected, but unsurprised because, in the back of the expat's mind, there's always the general expectation of sudden upheaval. In Korea, you learn not to trust the ground beneath your feet: nothing here is stable; everything changes.

My boss took me aside today to say he won't be in charge of the R&D department any longer, and that this week is his final week in our office. Boom—just like that. I won't go into much detail, here, given the behind-the-scenes nature of this turn of events, but suffice it to say that the boss will be shunted back to our old building, Mido Sangga, and working directly under the supervision of the Golden Goose's CEO. The boss asked whether I'd be interested in joining him back at the old building, and I said yes, but absolutely nothing is written in stone as of yet (which is also typical for how things move in Korea, especially at hagweons, which are notorious for tacking wildly port and starboard for no apparent reason). It's doubtful that I'll be able to move to Mido at the same time the boss moves, so for at least the first few weeks or months of this changeover, I'll be experiencing exactly what my coworkers will be experiencing: a new department head, and very likely, a totally different set of marching orders that will mean canceling our current projects and starting new ones.

On the (possibly) bright side, if R&D is brought more directly under Korean management, the work we do will be less creative and more boneheaded, i.e., our projects will merely be extensions of current or previous projects that had been initiated elsewhere in the company. For those of us blessed or cursed with lazy temperaments, this will be a godsend: just give us the specific procedures to follow, give us a deadline, then let us do our robotic work. We won't have to do nearly as much actual content-creation, and there'll be precious little graphic-design work for our designer. Workloads might become heavier, in terms of sheer volume, but each individual task will be simpler, more straightforward, and more regimented in terms of how it's to be done. Will less actual R&D for us R&Ders, all that's left is rote activity.

All of this goes against our current boss's vision and ambitions, of course; he saw R&D as the means for our company to create company-specific materials, thus resulting in a distinct brand image. What's going to happen, now, is a reversion to the Korean way of doing things, which will involve actively cribbing from established publishers and "creating" materials that dovetail in style, tone, and content with what those other publishers produce.

I wonder whether our new supervisor will be Korean. Will s/he speak English or rely on those of us who speak some Korean to act as intermediaries? I wonder how long I'll have to wait before I can make the transfer to Mido... or whether I'll transfer at all. I just signed a three-year contract with this company, partly on the assumption that I'd be working with the same boss. Many of the private understandings that I have with my current boss (comp time, vacation, daily work schedule, etc.) will go out the window when the new regime is installed. What will that be like?

For the moment, I think it's best to assume I'm going to endure a few weeks or months of unpleasantness before I can jump ship back to Mido. As for the nixing of several of the projects I'm working on, well... it is what it is. Projects get cancelled in medias res all the time. That's been true even under the current boss.

More on this as it happens, and it's all happening fast—from my perspective, at least.

UPDATE: I just found out that our new boss, whoever he is, will need to be a fluent or native English speaker, likely American. The new boss may, in fact, be one of my coworkers, whom I've long suspected of grooming himself for a supervisory role. I can say with no envy or bitterness that he absolutely deserves the position—one that I'm not willing to take, even though the boss has asked me, on several occasions, whether I'd be willing to succeed him eventually. Me, I'm just a foot soldier, with no desire for a leadership role. Just hand me work to do, and I'll do it to the best of my ability. This coworker, on the other hand, has boundless energy, and is constantly working on self-improvement and professional development. Over the past year, I've watched him acquire various skill sets through online courses as a way of making himself ever more useful to the company. I think he was made for this position, and I hope that, if he gets it, he gets a raise that's commensurate to his responsibilities. At the very least, he needs to be earning more than I'll be earning come September.