TLDR: Korean has all kinds of really convoluted rules about how to be respectful to your superiors. (It's bad enough that it's what made me give up on learning it.) One of them is that you can't call them by their name. Normally you would use a job title or some term of respect.
So who is your superior? It's not just your boss, it can be as petty as them being a few years older than you. So there's a major pain in the butt when two people meet where you have to subtly work out between you who whether you're equals or one of you is on a slightly higher level.
So in order to skip that bullshit and have a culture that's less obsessed with seniority and age, the hip new startup companies are having their employees pick English names and use those instead. Tbqh I suspect it's more because they think being Vivian or Bradley is cooler.
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This idea started with Korean Air in the 90s. They had an unusually high number of accidents and it was determined that their junior officers would rather risk flying into the ground than break cultural hierarchy.
An outside consultant came in and made English mandatory for Korean pilots while flying
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Yeah and they also had the problem in that generation that whatever your rank in the military had been, that stuck with you for the rest of your life. So someone less competent might be in charge because of their rank 20 years earlier.
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Source? Not doubting you, just want more info.
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I originally read it in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. If you can stomach a few r-slurred conclusions, the book is pretty neat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801#Investigation_and_probable_cause
PDF of the cockpit voice recorder for Korean Air Flight 801
To summarize, there is an instrument on runways called a glide slope that sends a signal to help planes land. Guam's runway's glide slope is not working (landing is still possible, just harder) and the captain mentions this in his descent briefing. The captain is extremely tired and repeatedly talks about wanting to go to bed and sleeping arrangements. They begin their descent at night in heavy rain. Visibility is so bad that the captain mentally defaults to using the glide slope, despite already "knowing" the reading is wrong. The first officer and flight engineer are both completely aware of these issues and the best protests they can manage are, "Wow, it's very rainy tonight" and "Is the glide slope working?"
The captain ignores his snivelling underlings and crashes into a hill 3 miles short of the runway.
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