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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Good thing Korea has cloud providers, apparently Kakao has even gone...beyond the cloud!

https://kakaocloud.com/ https://www.nhncloud.com/ https://cloud.kt.com/

To name a few.

They are overwhelmingly whitelabeled providers. For example, Samsung SDI Cloud (the largest "Korean" cloud) is an AWS white label.

Korea is great at a lot of engineering disciplines. Sadly, software is not one of them, though it's slowly changing. There was a similar issue a couple years ago where the government's internal intranet was down a couple days because someone deployed a switch in front of outbound connections without anyone noticing.

It's not a talent problem but a management problem - similar to Japan's issues, which is unsurprising as Korean institutions and organizations are heavily based on Japanese ones from back in the JETRO era.

I spent a week of my life at a major insurance company in Seoul once, and the military style security, the obsession with corporate espionage, when all they were working on was an internal corporate portal for an insurance company… The developers had to use machines with no Internet access, I wasn’t allowed to bring my laptop with me lest I use it to steal their precious code. A South Korean colleague told me it was this way because South Korean corporate management is stuffed full of ex-military officers who take the attitudes they get from defending against the North with them into the corporate world; no wonder the project was having so many technical problems-but I couldn’t really solve them, because ultimately the problems weren’t really technical

I've done some work for a large SK company and the security was manageable. Certainly higher than anything I've seen before or after and with security theater aspects, but ultimately it didn't seriously get in the way of getting work done.

I think it makes sense that although this is a widespread problem in South Korea, some places have it worse than others; you obviously worked at a place where the problem was more moderate. And I went there over a decade ago, and maybe even the place I was at has lightened up a bit since.

    > South Korean corporate management is stuffed full of ex-military officers

For those unaware, all "able-bodied" South Korean men are required to do about two years of military service. This sentence doesn't do much for me. Also, please remember that Germany also had required military service until quite recently. That means anyone "old" (over 40) and doing corp mgmt was probably also a military officer.

The way it was explained to me was different... yes, all able-bodied males do national service. But there's a different phenomenon in which someone serves some years active duty (so this is not their mandatory national service, this is voluntary active duty service), in some relatively prestigious position, and then jumps ship to the corporate world, and they get hired as an executive by their ex-comrades/ex-superiors... so there ends up being a pipeline from more senior volunteer active duty military ranks into corporate executive ranks (especially at large and prestigious firms), and of course that produces a certain culture, which then tends to flow downhill

Did you happen to notice interesting phenomenon like “the role becomes a rank”?

The difference is that South Korea is currently technically still at war with North Korea.

This - you and half of the smart people here in the comments clearly have no idea what it's like to live across the border from a country that wants you eradicated.

Depends on if these were commissioned officers or NCOs. Basically everyone reaches NCO by the end of service (used to be automatic, now there are tests that are primarily based around fitness), but when people specifically call out officers they tend to be talking about ones with a commission. You are not becoming a commissioned officer through compulsory service.

> That means anyone "old" (over 40) and doing corp mgmt was probably also a military officer.

Absolutely not. It was very common in Germany to deny military service and instead do a year of civil service as a replacement. Also, there were several exceptions from the """mandatory""" military service. I have two brothers who had served, so all I did was tick a checkbox and I was done with the topic of military service.

Also Israel - and their tech echo system is tier 1.

As somebody that has also done work in Korea (with on of their banks), my observation was that almost all decision making was top-down, and people were forced to do a ton of monotonous work based on the whims of upper management, and people below could not talk back. I literally stood and watched a director walk in after racking a bunch of equipment and commented that the disk arrays should be higher up. When I asked why (they were at the bottom for weight and centre of gravity reasons), he looked shocked that I even asked and tersely said that the blinking lights of the disks at eye level show the value of the purchase better.

I can't imagine writing software in that kind of environment. It'd be almost impossible to do clean work, and even if you did it'd get interfered with. On top of that nobody could go home before the boss.

I did enjoy the fact that the younger Koreans we were working with asked me and my colleague how old we were, because my colleague was 10 years older than me and they were flabbergasted that I was not deferring to him in every conversation, even though we were both equals professionally.

This was circa 2010, so maybe things are better, but oh my god I'm glad it was business trips and I was happy to be flying home each time (though my mouth still waters at the marinaded beef at the bbq restaurants I went to...).

Military culture in SK (especially amongst the older generation who served before democratization in the late 1990s) is extremely hierarchical.

All able bodied men don't become officers.

I am very happy with the software that powers my Hyundai Tuscon hybrid. (It's a massive system that runs the gas and electric engines, recharging, shifting gears, braking, object detection, and a host of information and entertainment systems.) After 2 years, 0 crashes and no observable errors. Of course, nothing is perfect: maps suck. The navigation is fine; it's the display that is at least 2 decades behind the times.

I've been working for a Korean Hyundai supplier for two years training them in modern software development processes. The programming part is not a problem, they have a lot of talented people.

The big problem from my point of view is management. Everyone pushes responsibility and work all the way down to the developera so that they do basically everything themselves from negotiating with the customer, writing the requirements (or not) to designing the architecture, writing the code and testing the system.

If they're late,they just stay and work longer and on the weekends and sleep at the desk.

> If they're late,they just stay and work longer and on the weekends and sleep at the desk.

This is the only part that sounds bad? Negotiating with customers may require some help as well but it's better than having many layers in between.

If the dev does everything, their manager may as well be put in a basket and pushed down the river. You can be certain there are a lot of managers. The entire storyline sounds like enterprise illness to me to be honest.

I’ve driven a Tucson several times recently (rental). It did not crash but it was below acceptable. A 15 year old VW Golf has better handling than the Tucson.

    > Korea is great at a lot of engineering disciplines. Sadly, software is not one of them

I disagree. People say the same about Japan and Taiwan (and Germany). IMHO, they are overlooking the incredible talents in embedded programming. Think of all of the electronics (including automobiles) produced in those countries.

Embedded electronics, including from those countries, does not have an enviable reputation. :(

What about automobiles from Japan, Korea, and Germany? They are world class. All modern cars must have millions of lines of code to run all kinds of embedded electronics. Do I misunderstand?

Yet people complain about their many software and UI issues all the time.

Good point! I wasn't treat that as "software" in my answer but it's true that their embedded programming scene is fairly strong.

That doesn't seem accurate at all. The big 3 Korean clouds used inside Korea are NHN Cloud, Naver Cloud and now KT. Which one of these is whitelabeled? And what's the source on Samsung SDI Cloud being the "largest Korean cloud"? What metric?

NHN Cloud is in fact being used more and more in the government [1], as well as playing a big part in the recovery effort of this fire. [2]

No, unlike what you're suggesting, Korea has plenty of independent domestic cloud and the government has been adopting it more and more. It's not on the level of China, Russia or obviously the US, but it's very much there and accelerating quickly. Incomparable to places like the EU which still have almost nothing.

[1] https://www.ajunews.com/view/20221017140755363 - 2022, will have grown a lot now [2] https://www.mt.co.kr/policy/2025/10/01/2025100110371768374

Samsung owns Joyent

Nevertheless isn't Joyent registered in the US?

The last time I heard of Joyent was in the mid-2000s on John Gruber’s blog when it was something like a husband-and-wife operation and something to do with WordPress or MovableType - 20 years later now it’s a division of Samsung?

My head hurts

In the meantime, they sponsored development of node in its early days, created a could infrastructure based on OpenSolaris and eventually got acquired by Samsung.

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