Translator: Nox

Tsunami Advisory

Chapter 3

The next day, and the day after that, Hae-il showed up dressed in an immaculate suit, looking like he had stepped right out of a fashion spread. It was glaringly out of place in the developers’ world, where the tacit dress code was usually crumpled hoodies, faded plaid shirts, and black short-sleeved tees in the summer.

Her female coworkers loved the eye candy, but Danbi was gripped by a sense of foreboding as the image of him in his school uniform—buttoned up to his throat with his tie neatly straightened—overlapped with the present. It seemed to signify that his relentless perfectionism hadn’t changed in the slightest. She could instinctively sense what kind of trouble that suffocating trait would eventually bring about.

In development, an endless cycle of “Why does this work?” and “Why doesn’t this work?”, the word “perfection” was virtually an impossibility. Even when you were certain everything was perfect, it often failed, and more often than not, you didn’t even know why. So as long as the code ran, you were grateful, and unless the DBA messaged you saying it was hogging data, you didn’t touch it—that was the unwritten rule of this field.

The Team Leader’s desk was a spacious spot in the innermost part of the office. And coincidentally, it was closest to Danbi’s desk. All she had to do was sit up straight to see him over the partition. Conversely, that meant if he craned his neck even slightly, he had a clear view of Danbi’s monitor and her hands on the keyboard. It felt as though she had been forcibly incorporated into his territory.

The proximity brought several unavoidable side effects. Chief among them was that every conversation the Team Leader had when calling a team member over to his desk was vividly audible to Danbi.

“There’s something I’ve been wondering about for a while. It seems like integrating Project A and Project B would make them far more usable, so why are they kept separate?”

Whether he had scoured the company’s internal systems and documentation before taking the post or received a thorough private briefing, within less than a week on the job, he had pinpointed the exact problem this company needed to solve first—the very one everyone had been painstakingly ignoring.

A deep sigh of “Ah…” leaked from the mouth of senior developer Yunseok, who had been summoned to his desk, and in that instant, the clatter of keyboards across the office surged into a storm as if on cue.

Development Team 1

Ha, please

Ah, please… T_T

I have a bad feeling about this

No wonder my dreams were so rough last night

What do we do? T_T

The company had a cursed “integration” project, dubbed the “manhole cover.” It was tangled in legacy code so massive and convoluted that no one dared lay a hand on it. Put nicely, it was a long-cherished, long-term project; put harshly, it was an endlessly dragging nuisance that ate away at the years without a single clue toward a solution. Or more frankly, a digital ruin frozen in the exact state it was three years ago.

The people previously assigned to this project, whether in planning or development, had their souls ground to dust and contemplated quitting one after another, throwing fits if anyone so much as uttered the syllable “in” from “integration.”

Danbi had been thrown into this project as a rookie, and it was undeniably the darkest, most agonizing period of her career. Everything she touched failed in succession, and every issue that popped up felt entirely like her fault. She had even sobbed in her mom’s arms after work, crying, “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a developer.” It was an atrocious project that made her want to voluntarily leave the dream company she had worked so hard to enter.

While everyone had been striving with one heart and mind to keep that manhole cover firmly pressed down under their feet, he had appeared and casually kicked the heavy lid wide open. It felt as if the stench, which had been festering and rotting to the brink of bursting, was spreading across the entire office in an instant.

“Ah… um… The ‘integration’ project for Project A and Project B has been underway since three years ago. But, um… the code for Project B is such a mess that processing it takes time…”

Yunseok dragged his words out with difficulty. Having been assigned to the project himself, he had a grim history of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.

“Hmm, even so, I don’t understand. What is the reason for a three-year delay? Is it a technical difficulty? Lack of cooperation from a certain team? Or… someone’s incompetence?”

Hae-il put chilling weight on that final word, “incompetence.” An icy chill instantly swept through the office. At some point, the clattering keyboard noise that had filled the room came to a complete halt. Everyone held their breath, ears pricked up. Even without turning to look, Danbi could vividly picture Yunseok’s pale, bloodless face.

In a company with a horizontal culture, a team leader wasn’t usually an intimidating figure. They were just a boss who rolled in the mud with you. The previous team leader would at most say things like, “Hey, the Director is chewing my ear off, so let’s do this right,” and wasn’t one to lecture team members.

So, the one chewing Yunseok out right now wasn’t just a “Team Leader,” but the “CEO Junior,” which was why it was inducing cold sweats. This man wasn’t a fellow salaried employee; he was an employer holding their livelihoods in his hands.

“Uh… The project in question had flawed initial architecture, and subsequent frequent feature changes and additional requirements caused the code to become severely tangled. Too many issues kept bursting simultaneously in completely unforeseen places…”

Before Yunseok could even finish making excuses, Hae-il’s sharp question pierced in again.

“So, are you saying the difficulty level made it impossible to solve?”

“It might not be completely impossible to resolve, but…”

“But what? Was there a lack of allocated manpower? Or did the developers lack the will? Or perhaps, was it simply a lack of skill?”

He kept demanding an answer from Yunseok. On the surface, his questions seemed like a rational approach toward development efficiency and problem-solving, but to the team members, it felt like nothing short of a public dressing-down. The sliver of hope the team members held—that his character would be as flawless as his looks—was shattering into pieces.

“Uh… Along with the technical difficulties… new projects kept arising, so there were practical constraints in securing the manpower and time to assign to that project.”

At Yunseok’s answer, a few team members found themselves giving small nods without realizing it. It was the most textbook, yet most realistic excuse. Development work was always overflowing. Pre-release was hectic by default, and post-release was just as busy with fixes. Code that turned out to be trash upon second look had to be cleaned up, unexpected emergencies when servers crashed mid-day had to be dealt with, and corporate messenger notifications kept piling up around the clock. So saying “there is no time” was clearly an excuse, but also an undeniable truth.

Just then, a faint scoff drifted over the partition.

“Constraints…”

He murmured softly, a chilly trace of amusement in his tone.

“Time is something you make. Isn’t ‘practical constraints’ perhaps proof that there was a lack of will to overcome them? It wasn’t that you couldn’t, but that you didn’t, right?”

“…”

“It seems like it’s been almost two months since the major update wrapped up, so right now is relatively quiet, isn’t it?”

“Ah, it’s been about a month since deployment, and right now we’re in the middle of fixes and on-call response…”

“That’s something that always needs to be done. If you don’t take care of this now, when on earth are you going to do it? When the coffin lid is nailed shut? Or were you thinking, ‘It’s a hassle, so let’s just play dumb until I resign’?”

Yunseok sweated cold bullets under Hae-il’s relentless interrogation, trying desperately to salvage the situation, but his logic was already being sliced to pieces by Hae-il’s razor-sharp questions.

“Ha… Let’s do our work with a bit more responsibility. The company pays you a salary to produce results. Isn’t that right?”

He sounded like a drill sergeant disciplining a daydreaming recruit. Every single word from Hae-il became a sharp spear, stabbing straight into the hearts of the team members. Not a single word of it was wrong, but somehow it made a lump rise in their throats. Danbi had never had the luxury of slacking off enough to be called a so-called “salary thief” since joining the company.

Opening a laptop to work when a server crashed on weekends, during meals, or in the middle of sleep, and practically living at the office during crunch periods—that was a developer’s life. The salary was decent, but compared to the grueling workload, it hardly felt worth the cost.

“…Yes, you’re right.”

Although Yunseok was the one taking the beating on their behalf, it was effectively no different from the entire team being publicly reprimanded. At some point, all keyboard sounds in the office had died away, leaving only a tomb-like silence lingering in the air.

He had been just like this back in their school days. Backing the other person into a corner with logic until they couldn’t even squeak, crushing them with words—it seemed that vicious habit hadn’t changed at all. While she felt somewhat aggrieved, there were no logical flaws in his argument, and with his vaguely anticipated background as the CEO’s son, talking back was practically suicidal. Simply doing whatever you were told was the only wise way to navigate this rough corporate life.

She could already picture Yunseok heading straight to the rooftop to chain-smoke once this ordeal was over. Although she hated cigarette smoke, today she felt like she should follow him up and pat his shoulder to console him. After all, even without experiencing it herself, she knew how deeply humiliating it had to be to suffer such public shaming from a superior who looked younger than him.

It was right when Danbi was lost in those thoughts.

“Ah, on our team, I believe Danbi-ssi was an initial member of Project A in the past, and was involved in Project B afterward as well…”

Yunseok suddenly dragged Danbi up onto this cruel stage. At the unexpected mention of her name, Danbi’s entire body froze instantly. Yunseok had singled out Danbi as a key figure in this old, troublesome project—as if hastily tossing a scorching hot potato straight into her hands.

Hae-il’s gaze immediately shifted from Yunseok to Danbi. He gave a brief chin flick dismissing Yunseok back to his desk, then called Danbi over. It was only a short step across a single partition, but to Danbi, it felt like the final walk to an execution ground.

“Danbi-ssi, you took part in this project?”

In the end, it was becoming a problem all over again. It truly was a dreadful sewer that held her back time and time again.

“Yes… Team Leader. I participated ‘very briefly’ when I was a ‘rookie.’ Back then, I was basically just an ‘assistant’ to the senior developer who was mentoring me…”

Hidden beneath Danbi’s words was a desperate plea: I was a rookie and clumsy, I didn’t know anything, so please look for someone else. In truth, she vividly remembered dipping her feet into that horrifying Project B since her rookie days, and how it had eventually been shelved because the cascading issues made it impossible to move forward.

Thus, she knew the complexity and severe problems of Project B better than anyone. And buried inside that colossal garbage dump, there would undoubtedly be plenty of crap code that rookie Danbi had churned out during all-nighters. If she had her way, it was a Pandora’s box she never wanted to open again.

“It seems this is the very first problem I need to handle after coming here.”

“…Pardon?”

“The integration project that stalled three years ago. I will see it completed under my lead. First, we’ll refactor Project B’s legacy code, and if that looks good, we’ll proceed to database integration.”

“Uh…”

Hae-il was smiling while holding the pulled pin of a time bomb. Is this really how this is going? Before she even had a chance to speak, he held out a hand toward Danbi.

“I’ll do my best as well, so Lee Danbi-ssi, you need to trust me and give it your all.”

He had just cheerfully asked her to shovel shit with him. And Danbi, an office worker who had no choice but to do whatever she was ordered, could only take his hand.

“Ah… yes…”

Their clasped hands shook briskly.