Has it already been a month since I read the famous Golden Hour?
While organizing my notes, I flipped through the pages of memos I had left to keep...
There are fewer chances than I thought to ask yourself questions — that's what I started thinking.
So I'm leaving a post to think about them now rather than later.
p.33
Similar to a new fountain pen nib scratching across rough paper
A truly heavy expression. It's the description of the moment a surgeon opens up a patient. The expression itself can be called objective, but the precision of expression for that sensation is almost on par with a literature student. If such a person practices medicine, isn't every moment one where the heart tightens? The instant I read this, it felt like something hit my chest.
p.47
My job is to treat severe trauma patients, but they died right before my eyes. They needed to be saved, but couldn't be. What was needed was a system. No one knew what that was, and no one tried to find out, so we couldn't know either. The futility and meaninglessness of working where there is no system.
"IT companies pull overtime every day. There's no avoiding it. They develop systems but have no system for themselves. It's like the client's homepage runs great on mobile without Flash, while their own homepage is still in the old state. As a planner, I should have been able to stop their overtime, but I couldn't.
Something I always found ironic in IT planning: the speed at which buildings go up in the real world and the speed at which services are built in the virtual online world are no different — sometimes online takes longer. If you normalize by 1/N of the money and scale, the gap is obviously even wider. It's always "can't be helped," and if you still want to change it, you have to leave that place.
p.125
The ending of a livelihood should always be by someone else's hand. Until then, endurance is better; it's a waste even to try to wrap up the game yourself, so save your strength.. Until you quit, be as numb as possible.
"There's a line in the drama Ajeossi (The Man from Nowhere), where the older brother says to the younger: you have to endure no matter what. The moment you come out, it's over.' That came to mind. Isn't that how most office workers live? They carry a resignation letter tucked against their chest going to and from work, but they never pull it out first. They say job hopping has a higher success rate while employed, but is that the only reason?
p.305
It was a structural problem. Even this place was no different from any other field in Korea. Principles crumbled, and we were not free from the logic of power. In such places, our position is only a shabby corner where the very continuance of our existence can't be measured. Swallowing unreasonableness is all we can do, and so we often keep ourselves close to death.
"IT projects are usually created in September-November of the previous year. Around August-September, the civil servant in charge tells the vendor's sales or CEO the range and scale of next year's budget, and asks for project ideas that fit that budget. Simple application projects are generally avoided. One reason is that citizens don't use them, but the bigger reason is that at the final reporting stage it doesn't visibly show the money was spent — that's the more dominant vibe. In recent years, there have been many AR (augmented reality) or VR (virtual reality) application projects. Because the money spent is obvious, and you can assign big budgets without anyone questioning it. It's a structural problem. It's a project citizens are supposed to use and it's tax money, but citizens are absent from the project. Why would local public institutions or tourist sites need AR and VR? Honestly, an IOC would be more effective. Hundreds of millions to tens of billions of won are spent this way every year. Put kindly, it's job creation. The problem is that domestic IT companies make money in this form, and domestic IT talent is building their careers at such companies, and they spend their days working late to make these never-to-be-used or hard-to-use applications or homepages, while studying in the gaps. These deliverables are all accessibility-compliant, award-winning, bug-free, and faithfully follow government guidelines. They are flawless, but meaninglessly useless.
Public officials rotate every three years. This is meant to prevent corruption. 100% a merry-go-round. Some know nothing about IT, some do. When an official is replaced, the successor gets handed over the responsibilities — and the vendor too. In that process there are no bribes. No financial corruption. But corruption of convenience is rampant. The most sensitive matters in a civil servant's career life are complaints and accountability. So if the vendor used by the predecessor didn't cause major problems, continuing with them is the safest move — if you don't want to take responsibility. And the bidding process is a circus. A vendor's proposal matters less than their track record. What do you think it was like at the very start of new domains like mobile web, AR, VR? Of course — homepage track record. Being a local vendor is a plus. And the most weighted factor is price...
p.396
Serious problems, like a tumor, don't kill an organization at once. They gradually cause paralysis. Paralysis leads the organization toward death. That responsibility and awkwardness is passed to the next person. By the time the damage is done, the person who caused the problem has already transferred or retired, so you can't even assign responsibility. Therefore, even when there are problems, the people currently in place don't worry about the future — they pursue their own interests and neglect what needs to be done.
That's how the public-sector officials above are. The vendor who raised issues gets blacklisted as impudent or annoying. That's the biggest reason a skilled Seoul-based vendor can't win local projects. On paper there are policies like screen quotas to nurture local vendors, but that's not reality. Local vendors are cheap. And on top of that, they go along with anything. The key point here is not whether it is possible or impossible. What matters is that attitude. If you're rigid, that's the end.
p.399
Between truth and falsehood, between politics and tidying up...
A job and a career are different. Livelihood — especially wife and children — has the right to override any justice. People who raised candles against the previous administration's unfairness will turn their backs when property taxes on their own homes rise. They turn away even when employee salaries need to be raised. Even when the world's only divided nation under armistice declares the end of war, if there's little gain for me, I turn away. Of course "little" is a relative measure. Even a relative deprivation can cause people to turn away. The moment there's no common enemy, everyone turns away by their own criteria. Justice is nothing. As long as there's no damage to my interests, it's a good world to live in. Today is so tight that thinking about consideration is out of reach. Of course this, too, is relative deprivation — that's the most difficult part.
Why such deprivation fills today's reality — brain-fiction — might be because the majority today is made up of the first dual-income couple generation and their children.
End.
