Developer, Army Corps, Occupational Life

I worked as a developer for three years. Throughout the six years of majoring in computer engineering and completing a master’s degree in college, I did a lot of coding, and I thought it suited my aptitude. So after six years of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, I got a job as a researcher at a research institute at a large company. It was quite a big company, so some of my college classmates joined together, and everyone was assigned to an ordinary department, but I was the only one who was assigned to an unusual department. It was a department that developed a system that was used in the field, and it was a Malman Institute, where there were many field trips and local business trips, and on average, 10 years old was a place to develop and improve the system used by more people in the field than our department members. According to his seniors, he was supposed to be in the field, but somehow he became a member of the institute. Anyway, after two years of working here, the department applied for a transfer to stay in Seoul as it moved to a local branch. But the department that moved so hard was not a normal place either. At that time, the company I got employed was a new company that was recently converted from a public company to a private company, but our team leader, who had a dream of creating a new business by breaking away from the image of a public company, chose SI as the business that our company should focus on in the future. The team leader, who had even excelled in sales, has won the first SI project in our company that we have never done before.

But the problem was that none of our team members had ever done a SI project. Our company was a research institute and all the team members had completed master’s or higher and were hired as researchers. All of them have been working on research projects and writing reports, and have never experienced a relationship between the two in their careers, and one day our team had to become a small SI company. It’s one of the most difficult clients in the world, the military…

At the time, I only did what my seniors told me to do and was in charge of the small module of the project, but this business seems to have been a bit off since the beginning. Each time the meeting was held, the customer added requirements that could not be realized, and the team leader, who was enthusiastic, accepted and brought all of the customer’s requests. He had to spend every night with only about 10 teammates and went to work without a day off for seven days a week or 365 days a year on his chased schedule. By the time everyone was exhausted from overtime and stress, one of the team members collapsed from overwork and was taken to the hospital, and around that time I decided to leave the company and put it into practice. We didn’t know how to reject the unfair team leader’s demands and just carried out the pouring work, leaving our bodies and minds devastated. After two bad relationships with other enviable conglomerates, I decided to quit and moved to a foreign company. He seemed to have been unable to bear the development task of working seven days a week and working overtime every day, and thought there was no future for the developer. My entry into the pre-sales business was this simple. The life of the developer was so hard and I wanted to find a job where I could live a life with dinner.

Anyway, just before leaving the company, when the first project was completed in the third year of the developer, the first project was completed and the field test and opinions were collected, during which he was dispatched to the military for several months. It’s already been more than twenty years, so I can’t remember the exact name of the unit, but it was a unit in Seoul, and I went to work with that unit every day, demonstrated to a very high person once a week, and performed tasks to modify the system with feedback from users. I had to stay and work in this unit for over a month, so I ended up living with the soldiers and eating jjambap together. At first, I, a woman in a military camp full of men, and I, not a soldier, were so uncomfortable to eat jjambap in line that I packed lunch and skipped lunch. Soon after, he was so busy that he couldn’t afford it that he ate jjambap without thinking. The rice did not go over my throat at first due to awkwardness and inconvenience, but I got used to it and spent a month satisfied with the delicious jjambap.

Over the years, my son went to the army and visited the unit as a parent’s invitation event, so I ate jjambap with my son. It seemed like parents were offered to experience what their son, who sent him to the military, was eating with a smile on his face when he recalled memories of more than 20 years ago. While eating high-quality jjambap with nuts and fruits, I said it was much better quality than jjambap I had twenty years ago, and my son was surprised. Twenty years ago, I had a lot of experience working on a military project, so I ate a lot of jjambap, and my mom said she was jealous because she had a lot of fun experiences in her company life.

At that time, I was really tired and scared to work in the military, but this could be a fun experience for my son. Now I confess that I was very scared of the high-ranking officer of the unit, who always gets angry. When the high-ranking official appeared, not only we but also everyone in the army seemed nervous, and if he poured out something, there was a mountain of work. And I really hated my team leader. I really hated the irresponsible team leader who couldn’t coordinate our promises with our customers, dragged around by our customers, and called us a mountain of work to do. All the work I had experienced for three years was hard, but after a year of military projects, I decided to quit.

But decades after leaving the company, I can’t stop remembering the time when I did the military project. It was a very interesting and precious experience for me to experience how many developers have been developing while residing in military units, and to go to various units and conduct on-site tests to see if location tracking was correct in military jeeps. (The project we carried out was a military positioning project, so we had to visit various units and conduct field tests.)

In fact, this project did not succeed. I heard that the first time the company to do the SI project and the customer who had too many ideals failed to narrow the gap, and the project ended in failure as it was getting harder and harder in its second and third year.

But thanks to this hard experience, I have a story to tell when my male colleagues talk about military dance.

This is what I say when my colleagues start talking about the army at a get-together or in private.

“Have you ever been to the army? I’ve worked in the army.”