throwaway201025

Does Intel also enforce such a rule to office workers, like Samsung does? I can partly understand the desire to control accidents in manufacturing environments, but we're not exactly at such a place. Samsung's rule is applied to all workers regardless of campus, including the inside of a building consisting of mostly software engineers and office workers. It almost feels like the company wants social equality among employees or something.

As a Samsung employee, I've been continuously being disappointed by the company culture. Recently, the company introduced a new policy that prohibits phone usage while walking inside the company building, due to "safety concerns". Samsung employed ~20 safety guards to supervise and monitor phone usage throughout the campus and if you're caught by them, you will be warned. If you are caughted twice, your team lead will be notifed of the incident. If you are caught three times or more, you are required to watch an educational video and submit a written apology. I could not believe such a policy could emerge from the very company that makes smartphones. Samsung even had a TV commercial highlighting phone usage on the road!

Under such a restrictive and top-down culture like this, I believe nothing interesting can emerge. I can only expect the downfall of the company. Nowadays I'm trying to work as little as possible and desperately searching for other jobs.

> Apple internal iOS devices used by engineers are "dev-fused".

We at Samsung use a similar mechanism called Anti Rollback Prevention (ARP). It is a switch that can be enabled for normal devices if the employees using them are given an approval by their boss. Only a handful of employees have access to it, and the switch turns off by itself after a defined period.

It is great to hear about your experiences on what to do to overcome initial career choices. I agree that I might be seeing the grass in the other places greener. I'll have to be more careful when considering moving to other companies. Thanks for your kind and thorough answer!

Good to see a fellow (former) Samsung employee. What company did you move to? As I've also primarily worked on in-house software only, I'm finding myself less and less competitive in the era of venture capitals and IT services. Did you find a solution?

It must be the same test. There are three levels in the test and new employees are given the first level.

Just out of curiosity, did you take the exam? Was the process satisfactory? Did you have a feeling that the test correctly represented participants' skills?

It is not exactly mandatory, but the company nags the employees who haven't passed the exam yet. It is also good for your performance rating, because the managers are advised to consider the result of the exam when doing performance review.

Samsung has an internal programming test for its employees, and it prevents the use of any standard libraries. So we have to implement hash tables ourselves every time. It is good that I now find it relatively easy to build hash tables myself, but I think this limitation is too restrictive because being good at implementing hash tables hasn't been useful to my daily programming tasks.

> Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women."

I don't think that's true. I work for Samsung and we talk about market share and competitors all the time.

I mean, why shouldn't we? Being crystal clear is a very good step to achieve a goal. We need to be more honest.

As a Samsung employee, I'm a bit worried if there could be a governance dispute. Due to the Samsung Group not having a holding company, and the high amount of the inheritance tax in South Korea, the current major stockholder Lee Jaeyong, who is the son of Lee Kunhee, may have some difficulties maintaining the current governance. I hope this does not lead the company to a crisis.