The Day the Zoo Came to the Office

Take Your Kids to Work Day, a Sergey Brin open mic, and where the line between company and family sits — in the US, Korea, and the AI era.

Back when I worked at a big tech company, the mood inside would shift every year as late April deepened. Take Your Kids to Work Day — you bring your children in and they spend a day, sometimes two, around the office. I assumed it was a Google thing until I learned it’s a common spring ritual at plenty of American companies. The closest Korean equivalent lands around Children’s Day in early May — a national holiday here — and it isn’t so far in spirit from a Korean president inviting kids to the presidential office for the afternoon. Let me pull a few photographs out of memory.

The zoo and the science demos

Events run all over the campus. There are animals out on the lawn. And — this being a company full of engineers and scientists — rows of science demo booths. In one office there were tables where kids drew pictures or fiddled with Lego. To really do it right you had to pull your kid out of school for the day, but it wasn’t a bad way to get some air. As my own kids got older and missing class started to feel like a cost, it slowly became someone else’s event — yet the hours those parents and children spent together have stayed with me, vividly. Chasing a small child from booth to booth all day is, of course, exhausting.

From the company’s side the day felt close to a half-holiday. Work couldn’t run the way it usually did, so people went along with it, and you’d see volunteer hands running the event — colleagues you almost never otherwise crossed paths with. Meetings still happened in the gaps, of course, on a phone or a laptop. I remember kids sitting in on those meetings, dragged there against their will.

Take Your Parents to Work Day

In the same spirit there was, every so often, Take Your Parents to Work Day. It didn’t apply to me, so I never paid it much attention, and it didn’t seem to run on any regular schedule — it was never as loud as the kids’ version. You bring your parents in and show them where their grown child works and what they actually do all day. It felt closer to a group tour. I never had the chance to bring my own parents, in Korea or the US, so I couldn’t quite relate — though I suspect that if my kid were grown and their company invited me, I’d be quietly very proud.

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Because it was a day for the elders, I remember an open-mic Q&A on an outdoor stage. This was around the time Google had announced it was shutting down Google Reader — its much-loved RSS reader — and the decision was being protested, in earnest, inside the company. The very first question, from someone’s parent, was: why are you shutting down a service people love? We’d been asked in advance, by announcement, to keep the awkward questions to ourselves — though how much of the whole exchange was choreographed, who can say. What I remember is the very American questions that broke the script, and Sergey Brin — one of Google’s founders — answering them seriously.Fast fail. That phrase has stayed with me a long time.

In Korea, and in the AI era

During my Google years I sometimes saw the company gather people’s families to celebrate when something had gone well. When things went really well it took the form of a family workshop, special time off, a party, a dinner — rare experiences. And every time, the bosses would, without exception, stand and thank everyone’s families, politely, on behalf of the company. That landed.

In Korea, too, I’ve seen a handful of companies put on a Children’s Day event — a small performance, something like that. Beyond that, the Korean version tends to stay quiet: you slip into the office on a weekend with your kids. Bringing employees’ families into the building isn’t really a natural thing here. The line between company and family sits in a noticeably different place in the US and in Korea.

As remote work matters more, and as we move into an era of working alongside AI agents — where a working life is sliced far finer than it used to be — I don’t know what becomes of days like these. Part of me thinks: what’s the big deal about the place where you happen to do your work? But I also wonder what an office where people and agents work side by side would even look like, shown to a child. And before that, I feel lucky — and grateful — to have been a generation that still had this kind of thing to share.

Part of Lessons from the Company — first-person notes from inside engineering organizations, from my years at Google and after. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/177