.png)
3 hours ago
2
Around midnight at Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor offices outside Seoul, Han Ki-bak, a chip design engineer, saw a colleague collapse after working months of grueling late nights. Stunned, Han couldn’t move.
“Because I had pulled so many all-nighters, I was out of my mind. Instead of rushing to help her, I just sat in my chair, wondering, ‘What should I do?’” he recalled about the incident in 2020, speaking to Rest of World.
As paramedics arrived, Han looked on in a daze.
Years later, Han, the former head of a Samsung workers’ union, continues to pull all-nighters during crunch periods. Although chips have gotten more technically advanced over his 14 years at the company amid an accelerating global chip race, Han’s engineering team has grown leaner.
“Each engineer used to be assigned a single [part of a chip’s design], but now juggles two or three,” he said. “At this rate, I feel like I’m going to die.”
Scarred by long hours, heavy workloads, and lower bonuses compared to rivals, many Samsung engineers are leaving for South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix, 10 current and former engineers told Rest of World. Some are moving to Micron and Intel in the U.S., as well as Chinese competitors such as CXMT and YMTC. Burnout is deepening across short-staffed teams already stretched thin, they said. All workers except Han requested they be identified by pseudonyms because they feared retaliation from the company.
“The general vibe among engineers is that we’ll work here for a short while before leaving for another company,” Han said, referring to his colleagues’ outlook in the past year.
Semiconductors underpin all modern electronics from LEDs to Teslas, and the kind that Samsung specializes in — high-bandwidth memory chips — are crucial for powering Nvidia’s cutting-edge hardware used to train artificial intelligence models. Samsung reigned as the world’s top memory chipmaker for more than three decades until this year, when it was dethroned by SK Hynix, another South Korean semiconductor titan.
Samsung’s foundry business, which makes chips for clients, is also struggling to compete with Taiwan’s TSMC, which controls more than two-thirds of the foundry market. Samsung’s foundry and chip design divisions lost 3.18 trillion won ($2.4 billion) in 2023.
“Samsung is facing a do-or-die crisis,” Lee Jae-yong, Samsung’s chairperson, told executives in March, promising reform. The company has planned internal audits of its semiconductor departments to improve competitiveness.
Samsung’s leaders have tied the company’s crisis to a non-communicative and hierarchical work culture. “The culture of hiding or avoiding problems to get through the moment, and reporting unrealistic plans based solely on hopeful expectations, has spread and exacerbated our problems,” Jun Young-hyun, the semiconductor business head, wrote in a staff memo last August.
A spokesperson from Samsung told Rest of World the company is “focused on reinforcing its technological competitiveness and fostering a healthy workplace culture.”
All the talented engineers are leaving. That’s how we’re falling behind.
Samsung is South Korea’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of about $271 billion on June 10, accounting for 16% of the value of the country’s stock exchange. Founded in 1938 as a shop selling vegetables and dried fish, Samsung has since grown into a global semiconductor powerhouse fueled by an intense hustle culture.
Some 70,000 employees work in Samsung’s semiconductor division, spread across rows of glass-walled office buildings and manufacturing plants. These are woven through landscaped gardens in Hwaseong, Giheung, and other industrial cities outside Seoul that house some of South Korea’s biggest technology companies.
Not that long ago, Samsung was considered a dream job and its workers were referred to as “Samsung men” — members of an elite corporate class who wore their Samsung affiliation as a badge of honor.
“We used to say we have blue blood flowing through our veins. That’s not the case anymore,” Jin, an equipment engineer who has worked at Samsung for a decade, told Rest of World, nodding to Samsung’s blue logo.
Leaving for a rival was once taboo, but now, “openly applying to SK Hynix has become our culture,” Cho, a process engineer, told Rest of World.
Young engineers at Samsung are scouring workplace review websites like Blind, and flooding group chats on the instant messaging platform Kakao Talk with job application tips, engineers said.
Senior engineers are leaving for tech giants abroad, including Micron, Intel, Apple, and Google in the U.S., where salaries are higher and perks are more lavish, they said. That’s despite a broader shift in tech, even in Silicon Valley, where longer work hours and more unstable jobs are becoming common.
In 2024, Samsung fell to sixth place in a South Korean employer ranking survey, from second the previous year.
Cho said he was exhausted after working excessive weekend shifts for many months to cover for four vacancies on his team. The 29-year-old is now workshopping his cover letter for SK Hynix with his coworkers. Even his manager has encouraged his team to jump ship, Cho said. “‘Why aren’t you applying to SK Hynix?’” he recalled the manager saying. “‘Get out of here fast!’”
“All the talented engineers are leaving,” he said. “That’s how we’re falling behind.”
Engineers are asked to log overtime as “nonworking” hours so that Samsung doesn’t violate the government’s 52-hour workweek limit, Han and five others said. “I work many hours for free,” Han said.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Employment and Labor told Rest of World the ministry is aware of similar alleged violations at another Samsung division. But they have not received any complaints from Samsung’s chip workers, he said.
When an executive shifts blame, it rolls down to the managers, then onto employees. As a result, false reporting became commonplace.
Samsung has grown into a bureaucracy that is slow to innovate, Kim Yong-jin, a professor of management at Sogang University, told Rest of World. Even as SK Hynix heavily invested in developing the next generation of memory chips, Samsung held back thinking the high development costs were not justified by the niche market. Its foundry business also struggled to retain clients. Then, the AI boom hit.
Following a steep drop in revenue in 2023, Samsung paid no bonuses to employees. Employee bonuses last year were 72% lower than payouts during the pandemic’s boom years, engineers said.
“It’s like being slashed to a third of your salary,” Cho said. Once eager to stay late and push through extra work, he now clocks out promptly at the end of his shift. “Even if we work hard, we’re not getting paid any bonuses,” he said. “The work culture has changed.”
The Samsung spokesperson told Rest of World the company implements “a clear performance-based compensation system to support sustainable growth.”
The company has opted not to backfill positions, leaving staff scrambling, multiple engineers told Rest of World. “Recognizing that they’re in a precarious position, Samsung has temporarily stalled hiring,” said Park Jun-young, a semiconductor researcher at the Institute of Industrial Anthropology, who worked at Samsung as an engineer and recruiter for a decade.
In the past year, process engineer Kim has watched 12 out of about 70 engineers on his team leave. Still, no new hires were made until last month, when more engineers quit his team in frustration over chronic understaffing, he said. “Management knows we’re struggling to work because we’re understaffed, but doesn’t budge to backfill roles until a crisis breaks out,” Kim told Rest of World.
Short-staffed teams are taking on dangerous responsibilities. An equipment engineer on the shop floor told Rest of World he works overnight shifts alone, violating safety protocols requiring two engineers per shift, while lifting heavy metal gratings and monitoring robots. He sprints between rows of fabrication equipment through the night to perform checks. “That’s when accidents happen, and defects start showing up in products,” he said.
The spokesperson from Samsung told Rest of World the company is committed to providing “a safe working environment that strictly adheres to local rules and regulations.”
Whenever we have a problem, we wipe it out military-style, instead of finding a proper solution. It’s called the ‘Samsung way’.
Samsung’s organizational culture soured in 2018, during the tenure of Kim Ki-nam, then-head of Samsung Device Solutions and currently a senior adviser, said semiconductor anthropologist Park. Under Kim’s micromanaging leadership, a blame-shifting hierarchy hardened into the norm, he said.
“When an executive shifts blame, it rolls down to the managers, then onto employees. As a result, false reporting became commonplace,” Park said.
Kim Ki-nam did not respond to Rest of World’s request for comment.
Engineers today describe Samsung’s culture as “militaristic” and “hierarchical,” and say they are at the mercy of their managers. The managers, in turn, face rigid annual performance reviews based on granular metrics such as yield rates, production costs, and defects.
The managers are often longtime bureaucrats promoted for their ability to process paperwork rather than their technical competence, two engineers said. They focus on short-term projects that can meet annual performance goals, three engineers said. Managers are also given impractical cost-cutting targets, which they pass on to their employees, five engineers said.
The rigid performance metrics “fail to give managers room to reflect, recalibrate, and pursue long-term trial and error to build something new,” said Kim, the professor of management. Instead, they’re pushed to exaggerate their achievements, conceal mistakes and accidents, and pitch flashy but unworkable engineering plans, he said.
Four engineers told Rest of World they are routinely pressured by managers to fabricate or distort data to help meet these targets. Three of them said they witnessed engineers and managers inflate yield rates, which refers to the percentage of non-defective chips produced from a wafer. They also underreported defects, they said.
“Go rewrite your report,” Im, a 28-year-old equipment engineer, recalled his manager saying after he submitted a report with bleak but genuine data. “Then we go massage our data,” he said.
A former design engineer told Rest of World his manager implemented dysfunctional automation scripts, which he then reported as improving a chip design. Han, the former union head, recalled a manager pushing through unworkable designs over their team’s objections.
“Defects slip through quietly,” Im said.
Pushing back against hierarchy can result in poor performance reviews, some engineers told Rest of World. Others said the reviews are objective and metrics-based. “Performance reviews are our lifeline, pressure point, and carrot,” Jin said.
The Samsung spokesperson told Rest of World the company “ensures engagement with [its] employees is based on fairness, transparency, and flexibility.”
The organizational culture at Samsung has now earned a dubious descriptor — the “Samsung way,” which refers to a habit of obfuscating data and concealing problems, Jin said.
“Whenever we have a problem, we wipe it out military-style, instead of finding a proper solution,” he said. “It’s called the Samsung way.”
Reflecting on the troubles at work, equipment engineer Im said the company’s top-down culture has backfired on engineers’ performance and morale.
“Maybe that’s what gradually cost Samsung its competitive edge,” he said.
