The reason I feel anxious and dissatisfied,
I suspect, is that my attitude toward the life I want — and where I find a sense of accomplishment — differs from the values and sense of accomplishment of the group I belong to.
From another angle you could call it a victim mentality, but the cognitive dissonance I'm feeling goes roughly like this.
The inhumanity of the organization I belong to (buying an imported car while paying salaries late, the resignation of the longest-serving employee and the dissonance around it) combined with sales and schedules that don't match our resources, work that diverges from the plan, vertical communication and decision-making that makes the word "startup" laughable, absurd political attitudes.. and an aversion to learning anything new, a kind of insularity.
The pain, or internal conflict, that I feel doing the work
comes in the process of negotiating scope and schedule at some "reasonable" level. "Reasonable.." I get it. An organization is a group formed to make profit. So this isn't some sentimental fit or personal craving for perfection that makes me react negatively to "good enough."
It's simply dissatisfaction with the thinking about the customer, about the user, and with the collaboration or process required to achieve that.
"Then why don't you do it? So what's the solution? You try it then. The schedule is this, the available resources are this much."
So then I start thinking. If I'm going to do it alone, where can I start? Should I do some research through the people in my study group? When would be a good time to contact the client and their customers? By when do I need to prepare the interview list to approach them? But around that time, another call comes in. Another piece of work. A new project is starting the day after tomorrow, they say. I just have to add the features I'm told to add and finish the wireframes. Even doing just that, the schedule is tight. I compromise and get on with it, but another piece of work pulls me away and I can barely keep my head straight. Regretful, but I focus on the client's needs. The company needs the money first.. Four months pass that way, and the senior who quit the day I joined had worked like this for a year, and this company has been doing work like this for two years. Of course, this isn't just a problem here—it's something most agencies go through, and the worries I have are the worries most agency employees have. That's why turnover is much higher here than in other industries.
So what about me?
Will I contribute to improving the organization? Should I bend myself to the organization's flow? Should I find somewhere else that fits me and play migratory-bird again? Is a migratory-bird who keeps moving a bad one? An unavoidable one? A growing one? Or one who will eventually lose the way?
Let me go back to the moment I returned to office work.
I started a cafe called normalstory at the back gate of the Eunma Apartments in Daechi-dong. As income stabilized and regulars built up through magazines, mass media and communities, I started experimenting on various projects with them. I began paying attention to keywords like indie projects, everyday art, shop-in-shop, social enterprises, and collective intelligence.
Not just a nostalgic, "original" gukbap-style warm-and-human place—but a space where creative groups, their works, and people living ordinary lives could gather and empathize through shared projects.
But for a tiny business, the growth of income/customers and the expansion of projects soon came with new risks. That's when I started to think seriously. Not the desk-theories of MBA-style branding, but what do tiny businesses actually need? What more do I need to learn, what attitude do I need? What more do I need to prepare for the empathy I want? I'm lacking in so many things. If this is what I want, if I'm actually doing what I want to do, then maybe it's more rational for me not to be the CEO... If I can head in the right direction, if I can go further, I don't have to be the captain of the ship.
Around that time of wondering, the Omnia came out. If smartphones.. if mobile takes off, then? What if the "space" I want isn't a physical space after all? Whoa.. that would be huge! First, I need to study this field.
The overall issues I felt at the IT companies I joined:
They make hasty, self-serving judgments that any technology they can't handle (i.e., anything new) is unnecessary or unreasonable.
They mistake copy-based processes for know-how (the planner's assets are templated forms; development's assets are the solution stack).
Resistance to, and defensiveness about, sharing documents and source.
Client-centered thinking rather than user-centered.
Viewing in-house staff as resources for a project (this may be normal across companies in general).
Rigid, siloed roles and top-down communication (again, typical of most companies).
Deliver by the deadline and stamp the inspection sheet.
These weren't things I felt at the fashion company. That was their own business. Sharing status and communicating across roles was so critical that it could make or break that season. And work didn't end with one season—based on that season, the direction for the next was set, executed, and the one after that was already being considered as a baseline.
In IT (at least where I've been) these kinds of things are dismissed as posturing or empty talk. Or someone will say, "you're just one employee."
Most agencies or SIs say, "eventually I'll do my own business (service)." But they say they're enduring it for the near-term income, for the sake of their future business.
(A quick aside: my juniors studied English to get into big companies. The juniors who made it into those big companies always say, "I'll grind it out for 10 more years, save up, and start my own business." It's a huge amount. A junior just in her second year has already ruthlessly saved 50 million won. But I tell them: as you are now, you can't run your own business. Or you'll go bust within a year or two. A third party listening to our conversation would have cursed me on the inside: "loser—mind your own business. That junior senior salary and he's talking big." Anyway, a business doesn't run on money alone. I'm getting off track..)
But I want to tell them: dear big-company juniors, just like business isn't run on money alone—agency CEOs, your own service isn't built on know-how, technology, or operating capital either...
IT (agencies) were rational. Thinly so. You do contract work, you execute it appropriately, and that's that. Wrap up two or three projects a year and you can carry the whole year. No headache of spending money and agonizing over uncertain in-house services. They are skilled technicians. But they have no head. But then.. these days even finding technicians is hard.. freelancers are being shared around. Let me correct that.. they only have heads. They only have sales. Not sales for the customer, just sales for the client.
Wait—I've been talking about everyone else too much. Which just makes me some irresponsible anarchist? anti-agencyist? who only complains. And the important thing is that I'm supposed to be doing self-analysis here. Let me catch my breath and start again..
