This is a Shithole Company! ~Hope Arc~ (6)
Shithole company. The collective term for any workplace where no one in their right mind wants to work—and yet, plenty of people were still slaving away at them even now. Shin Na-young was no exception.
She arrived early in the morning, finished cleaning up, and greeted everyone with a bright smile. "Good morning!"
"Oh, Na-young. Morning."
"G-good morning..."
The company's first impression wasn't bad. Sure, she'd felt a bit annoyed doing the cleaning like Kim A-ram had said, but it was fine. Anything was better than the hospital admin job. From the start, just having four major insurances and the chance to do programming had Shin Na-young satisfied. No amount of bullshit military-style discipline in a company like this could touch her. Like a spear that couldn't pierce a shield, nothing could scratch her mental armor.
That's what Shin Na-young thought.
"From now on, what you'll be doing, Na-young, is interpreting and fixing the code here."
Kim A-ram—the PM, planner, salesperson, accountant... the shithole company's all-rounder who had appointed herself as Shin Na-young's mentor—laid it out.
"You can handle code interpretation in a week, right?"
"...Pardon?"
"I believe in you."
"..."
Shin Na-young replied. "Yes!"
Belief was a personal freedom, and Korea guaranteed religious freedom, so Shin Na-young just went with it. "Got it!"
"I like that energetic response."
"Thank you!"
"That bastard Im Seong-u up and left the company without any 'sense of responsibility,' which screwed us over. From now on, you'll have to pick up the slack and do great work, Na-young. Our goal is to get this done by next week."
She brought over a new planning document. It outlined the initial development draft for Sepiros Online.
"Since Seong-u left, the CEO thinks we need to cut back on the dev planning. I opposed it, but..." Kim A-ram said, glancing meaningfully.
Shin Na-young nodded.
"What you'll do from now on is super simple, Na-young. Upload the work to the Google Store as a private version and check if the main quest progresses."
Na-young peered into her own game. It crashed during the loading stage.
Kim A-ram's face twisted. "That guy made it work fine when he was handling it, but now it won't even start for us. Isn't that malicious?"
She figured there must be some development reason, but Kim A-ram seemed itching to badmouth Im Seong-u.
"You can fix this error quick, right?"
"Uh, y-yes."
"Good. I'll be expecting great things."
Shin Na-young stared at her own monitor.
...
I'm fucked.
Humans were surprisingly intuitive animals, sometimes sensing doom on instinct. Shin Na-young felt it the moment she saw his code.
What the hell is this even saying?
If the code Shin Na-young usually wrote was like a kindergartener's crayon scribble, then the code Im Seong-u had left behind was like a masterpiece painted by AI—a Western oil painting on par with the masters. It wasn't even comparable.
Interpreting his code was like a half-chick half-kindergartener trying to parse a master's thesis. Staring into that cryptic mess, she felt like an astronaut lost in space.
Na-young recited her own little prayer. It'll... work out somehow, right?
She endured like that for about five hours. Then her concentration hit its limit. Instinctively, she pulled out her phone.
-He replied right away.
Her high school childhood friend had studied hard to become a programmer, while she'd shouldered her family's financial burdens and was only now stepping onto this path.
Help me...
The words welled up in her throat but wouldn't come out.
Crash!
She recalled yesterday, when Im Seong-u had gripped a glass cup and shattered it for real. Just hearing the name "Railroad" triggered his anger issues—what kind of manners would it be to beg help from someone who'd already quit?
Seong-u's happy now. I don't want to ruin that.
She quietly put her phone down.
-Click.
CEO Han Yu-ra, back from another round of emotional labor with investors, opened the door. She spoke to Na-young in a deadpan tone, as if seeing overtime programmers was routine.
"Oh, Na-young. You still haven't gone home?"
"Ah, no. I was looking at the code."
"You're working hard. Want to grab dinner together?"
Socializing was an unavoidable virtue in shithole company survival. Shin Na-young went along with it. "Thank you!"
"I'll buy something tasty. Come on."
Shin Na-young got her hopes up.
...
I really thought it'd be something super delicious again.
Shin Na-young's antennae drooped. What Han Yu-ra bought was kimchi stew. Shin Na-young wasn't some princess who needed French haute cuisine three meals a day to be happy, but when someone said "something tasty," you expected at least sushi or pasta over 10,000 won a pop.
But that's understandable.
Because it was a shithole company. Shithole companies didn't splurge. Even with a 1 billion won investment, they had to pinch every penny.
Shin Na-young watched Han Yu-ra poke at her phone without a word. Dark circles ringed her eyes, but her chest was bursting at the seams. She felt a twinge of jealousy. If this were a college hunting ground dive bar, some buzzcut scrawny dude would've already come sniffing for her number.
"Haa... Na-young."
"Yes?"
"Look at this?"
She held up her phone for Na-young to see. It was a shithole company calendar of sorts.
D-DAY: 92
"This is how much time we have left until our company's open beta."
"..."
"Still, we've got plenty of time, right? Of course, we need to add more characters in that period and develop the client to a point where it's actually playable..."
The game right now wouldn't even launch.
Loading won't work.
There was a note below it.
> // Loading resources via chunking. Need to do more work on this part.
Of course, she had no idea what that meant. To even get the game running, she'd need to understand what the loading code did—and that section alone was over a thousand lines. Still, three months should be enough somehow, right? Groundless hope stirred in Shin Na-young's heart.
"Be honest with me, Na-young."
"..."
"How was the code today? Tough?"
Han Yu-ra stared straight into her eyes. The clear gaze beneath those long lashes seemed to pierce right through Shin Na-young's soul.
"Um..."
"It was brutally hard, right? Kim A-ram said to do it in a week, but... how long do you think it'll take to interpret the whole thing?"
When Shin Na-young joined the company, she'd stuffed her resume with every self-help book buzzword to make herself look impressive. She was the type to avoid answers like "No, I can't" as much as possible, and Han Yu-ra was hoping for something similar this time.
As Shin Na-young hemmed and hawed, the CEO said, "I'll give you a month."
"...Yes."
A month was a paycheck's worth of time. Han Yu-ra was essentially paying Shin Na-young 3 million won pre-tax to handle this.
"You can do it in a month, right?"
"I... think it's possible..."
Han Yu-ra smiled. "Ah, good. That's all I needed to hear."
"Y-yes... yes."
"Thanks, Na-young. I'll be counting on you."
Han Yu-ra beamed. This woman has dreams.
For the first time in her life, Shin Na-young felt the weight of responsibility. But time was merciless, and 14 days slipped by just like that.
...
78 days until doom.
Railroad Software, the shithole startup, was inching toward its demise. CEO Han Yu-ra's mental state was starting to crack, and Kim A-ram wouldn't stop hounding Shin Na-young.
"Na-young? Don't you think it's about time you actually did something?"
CEO Han Yu-ra was always swamped with paperwork and external dealings, so she couldn't keep tabs. That's why Kim A-ram was always glued to Shin Na-young.
"How can you just stare at code all day? Huh? For two weeks? Show me what you've done so far."
Shin Na-young showed her the code with a gloomy expression. Adding comments bit by bit to Im Seong-u's code. Watching lectures. That was the only thing she could manage.
"You haven't done jack shit?"
"No... I tinkered here and there..."
"Which means nothing. Haa..."
Shin Na-young truly had nothing to show. Nothing worked. The game still wouldn't even show the loading screen.
"Just do something, Na-young. You think we pay you to sit there like this?"
"I haven't finished interpreting the code yet—if I touch it, everything could break."
"Na-young."
She said, "How long does it take you to read a single English sentence?"
Shin Na-young stared at Kim A-ram like she'd lost her mind. She wasn't a full programming expert yet, but this was beyond ridiculous. Was she some 50-year-old who didn't know computers?
"Pardon?"
"How long to read one line of English."
"T-ten seconds?"
"If you'd been working hard since you got here, you'd have interpreted the whole code by now, right?"
Na-young was speechless. She knew she was incompetent, but the critic's logic was so baffling she couldn't even think of a retort.
Oh, right. Code is in English.
"Taking a salary and doing nothing..."
Her stomach burned. Reading someone else's code was harder than writing documentation. Parsing another person's logic was labor in itself. And this was the treatment she got?
Im Seong-u... I get why you left.
She thought that, but still did her emotional labor. It was her specialty.
"Aigoo... I'm sorry, Planner Kim. But the code volume is so huge that just understanding it is a ton of work?"
"Ha. Developers are all the same. Always whining they can't do it!"
Kim A-ram spat the words and flung a document at her.
Thwack!
"This is the room decoration planning doc."
Install furniture and small props in rooms. Simple social element.
"Isn't this super simple planning?"
"..."
It looked simple enough. A basic social game feature for placing furniture and knick-knacks in rooms.
But there was a ton to do. "To implement that, I'd have to touch the entire system. New DB, understanding Seong-u's existing code..."
"Ha, Na-young."
"..."
"You gonna keep making excuses like you can't do it?"
"..."
"I cut out the room battles to make it easier on you and revised all my planning—shouldn't this be doable now?"
"Planner, open beta is in 78 days... Adding a new system is too much."
"No, I know that. Who doesn't? If you're just gonna whine you can't do it, why are you even sitting there? Why should I have to write docs for something you can't even build?"
"I'm sorry."
Im Su-yeon stood beside her, glaring at Na-young. Ah, I tried so hard to do well.
She wanted everyone to like her. But it looked impossible.
"So I simplified the planning and handed it over, right? Just rip out some code from what Im Seong-u made. It'll work then."
Shin Na-young was fed up with the machine-illiterate nonsense. The CEO gave her a week, and now the planner was bitching—what a joke. But snitching to the boss felt awkward too.
"A-ram."
Right on cue, relief pitcher Han Yu-ra arrived.
"A-ram. I gave Na-young a month, so stop pressuring her."
"But then I have nothing to do."
"That's what planners do—find work."
At that, Kim A-ram glared at the CEO buried in papers and stormed back to her seat.
Night fell. In the end, Na-young was left alone in the office, doing the only thing she could: watching lectures.
Tinkering with the code hands-on would build skills fast, but her level wasn't there yet.
Why do we suffer like this?
Just two weeks in, and she felt like she had cancer.
Sorry.
In the end, she texted Im Seong-u. Why had she waited this long?
She almost regretted it but stopped herself.
Guilt surged, but Im Seong-u didn't reply.
"Huh...?"
The issue she'd agonized over for two weeks resolved in three minutes flat.
What?
It was clearly just a similar method to what Shin Na-young had tried. But following Im Seong-u's instructions precisely made the code work like magic.
When I did the exact same thing, it didn't work...
Of course, what Shin Na-young had done and what Im Seong-u prescribed were subtly different.
But the emotion she felt now was pure awe.
How are you this good...?
The 100 hours of labor Shin Na-young had abandoned? For Im Seong-u, it was three minutes.