The situation in Korea is completely different. There are tens of thousands of jobs available, including white collar, but people don't want to work for those companies - everyone goes for the exact same handful of jobs, the very top. And because unlike in most of the West it's culturally acceptable to live with ones parents for 2 years while continuously applying for those jobs, that's what many people do. It's a tradeoff.

In fact, the parents often actively enable and support this strategy. Unthinkable in the West.

This is nothing like "I sent 300 resumes to every place in the country and can't get a job". Of course, such people do exist, but those are in majors/fields in which it was already near-impossible 10 years ago to get a job in most of the world. If everyone in Denmark would go "Maersk, Novo Nordisk, Carlsberg or bust", you'd see the exact same.

Honestly, your story indicates that your sister-in-law and her friends are likely at least middle class. Those who simply can't afford to sit around for 2 years (lower class) do just get a job straight away.

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neom 2 days ago | parent [-]

Can you provide a link to labour statistics indicating that? I don't think what you're saying is true at all, I'd be curious to read your source.

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jjani 2 days ago | parent [-]

https://www.munhwa.com/article/11487922

But really, being deeply ingrained into society and having personally worked at such places here in Korea is worth more than flawed statistics, which really all statistics are when it comes to these topics. I've literally personally interviewed the very few applicants we got as a small company outside of Seoul. They didn't know the difference between a GET and a POST; these were people applying as a backend API developers. We had to train people from absolute zero. And this was at a "modern" workplace ran by young leadership, which should theoretically be much more attractive - one of the, if not the number 1 most commonly named reason for not wanting to work for smaller companies (and even moreso outside of Seoul) is "old(-school) working culture".

https://www.segye.com/newsView/20250327517804

These companies aren't like Silicon Valley startups abusing H1Bs, hiring foreigners because they're cheaper, Koreans genuinely aren't applying.

Go ask her and her friends how many 중소 outside of 수도권 they've applied to. Again, if they've studied something like German language or archaeology then sure, but people aren't getting jobs in those fields in Sweden (to name a completely random high HDI country) either.

	▲	neom 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Good reading, thanks for the links. She she and her friends, came out of some version of this: https://metalart.hongik.ac.kr/en/academics/intro-faculty-det... I will say, her friend group is my only sample, but my general understanding is that it's even hard to get a job at olive young these days, maybe they're misleading us and are lazy tho, that could be true.