The Unusual Applicant
“Today is that man’s interview day, right?”
“Yes. 10:30 a.m.”
“Wow, can’t I go in too?”
“If you go in too, Juwon, it’ll be way too crowded in there. No.”
That man.
A middle-aged man who had suddenly moved from the HR department to development, all in order to jump ship to our company.
We were all curious about this applicant with such an impossible résumé.
His education and previous job were both perfectly ordinary.
Maybe it was human nature to be drawn to gambling, but no one could quite stop themselves from feeling anticipation for this bizarre applicant.
Knock, knock.
“Hello. I’m Kim Youngsu, here for the interview.”
“Ah, hello. Please come this way.”
Jae-yoon sprang to his feet and led that man into the conference room.
Youngsu, dressed neatly in a suit and even carrying a briefcase, looked like the very picture of a traditional office worker.
“We’ve had plenty of people show up in suits, but this is the first time someone’s brought a briefcase too.”
“Seriously, what kind of person is he?”
Choi Yeonghun, Jeong Hyeonwoo, and Seo Jeongwon, who had all agreed to sit on the panel for the first-round interview, wore expressions full of interest.
“If we look at the coding test results, we’ll get a sense of it. Let’s just finish the move, too.”
I, on the other hand, who wasn’t taking part in the first-round interview, answered with a completely indifferent expression.
Honestly, for me right then, the second office move was the more urgent issue.
Of course, since we were only moving into the larger office right next door, it wouldn’t take long.
I may have slowed down a little because I kept stealing glances into the small conference room facing the hallway, where Youngsu was taking the coding test.
“Siwon-nim.”
“Yes?”
“Youngsu-nim is hand-coding right now. Isn’t this a test we’re allowed to use a computer for?”
Yoo Jiwon, who had suddenly come over, told me about Youngsu with a puzzled look.
Hand-coding.
Writing code by pen on paper.
Even though we’d said he could use a computer, he was doing it by hand.
“Old-school.”
As I said it flatly, Jiwon went on as though she’d found something fascinating.
“But, Siwon-nim, I remember this coding test question being pretty hard. Does it even make sense that he’s already coding?”
Only after hearing that did I start to feel that something was off too.
“You’re right.”
Jiwon’s title might have been UX/UI designer, but she was not like the average UX/UI designer in a company.
A computer engineering scholarship student who was better at development than most developers her age.
Because of that, she communicated well with Ha Juwon about planning-related work, and she also handled all the basic coding herself. She was the kind of designer who wanted to do everything that could be seen with the naked eye.
In another company, she would probably have been a developer instead.
Someone who even Jiwon thought was facing a difficult problem had understood it and started touching the code in under ten minutes?
“That’s true all or nothing, then.”
“Seems that way.”
There were certainly people who understood problems as they coded.
But every applicant who had faced our coding test so far had spent at least fifteen minutes thinking before they even started typing.
That was because this wasn’t a coding test meant only to hire interns; it was the first-round test, designed with senior hiring in mind as well.
“Well, he could be a genius.”
Even so, I dismissed it lightly and continued with the move.
Once we’d finished moving quickly, the developers and I discussed the people who had taken the coding test over the past few days.
We talked about who we should interview, whether we should change the grading criteria, and so on.
“Siwon-nim, Hyeonwoo-nim, Jeongwon-nim, Youngsu-nim. The coding test is over.”
Then Jae-yoon let us know that Youngsu’s coding test had finished.
“Already?”
“He seems to be the type to just get things done quickly.”
“Still, he did set aside an hour, so he didn’t give up.”
With mixed expectations, we checked the code Youngsu had submitted.
The moment we looked at it, the exact same thought flashed through all our minds.
“Please ask when Youngsu-nim can come in for the interview. Tomorrow is fine. Today is fine too.”
Kim Youngsu.
Age forty-two.
He had majored in business administration, never taken a leave of absence, and landed a job at a mid-sized enterprise’s HR department straight out of school.
Then, all of a sudden, he started building a career in development.
The experience he’d built that way now totaled exactly three years.
“How can he do this with only three years of experience? He doesn’t even have a development background at all.”
“Did he maybe go to a coding academy?”
“No way. He can’t have gone to an academy for more than five years, can he?”
None of us could understand this situation.
In fact, among all of us, I was probably the least able to understand it.
Even if I tried to recall every developer I’d met in my previous life, I couldn’t remember ever seeing someone this capable at three years in.
“He might be almost as much of a genius as Siwon-nim.”
“Then, if he’s okay with it, could we take him over to our research team?”
“Huh? No, he applied to us.”
“Could we at least ask whether he’s interested in the research side? He’s good at English, and I feel like he’d write papers well too.”
People who had never actually coded thought there was a rigid formula to it.
They saw it as some field where you could grow in precise, measurable ways in proportion to how hard you studied and how long you stayed in the industry.
But anyone who had truly coded would know the one fact that couldn’t be denied.
“Real development has as much of a talent gap as the arts.”
Development is talent too.
I wasn’t joking—there were plenty of people who could work all night and still never outdo someone born with a developer’s instinct.
I knew that already, but this was such a dramatic case that I insisted on joining the first-round interview myself.
I was too curious.
“Hello, I’m Kim Youngsu.”
Youngsu entered the conference room wearing a suit that was a little different from yesterday’s, and he gave us a faint smile.
The rest of us, who had been murmuring among ourselves, all put on polite smiles and greeted him back.
Maybe because he’d spent so long in HR, but the way he carried himself the moment he stepped into the interview room was clearly different from everyone else’s.
“Hello. Thank you for making time for this interview on such short notice.”
“Ah, no. It’s better when we can get in touch quickly.”
The interview proceeded very calmly.
He explained his coding test in a textbook way, and he handled the practical work questions with the same quiet composure.
The only slightly unusual part was the reason he’d started coding in the first place.
“Our company’s payroll system seemed inefficient somehow. The budget going into it was pretty hefty, too. So I wanted to build a related program, and I got some tutoring.”
Who starts development in HR for a reason like that?
“Couldn’t you have just outsourced it?”
“Even if I had to outsource it, I thought it would ultimately be better to do so from a position where I understood what was being built. Then I came to believe I might be able to make the program myself, so I did.”
Who gets a little tutoring and then develops stable software on his own that’s fit for use across an entire mid-sized company?
“Could you show us that page?”
“Yes. Just a moment.”
On the laptop he took from his briefcase, the surprisingly polished software ran without a hitch.
“Did you build all of this on your own, or was there a task force team?”
“Ah, I did it alone. I got help from the IT team with the security-related parts, but I finished it myself.”
What was even more astonishing was how casually he said it.
This wasn’t the skill of someone who’d dabbled in everything; it was the skill of someone whose abilities were perfect in every area except design.
“People around me have often told me I seem to have a knack for development. Once that started happening, I became even more interested, so I boldly pivoted my career toward becoming a developer at an IT company.”
Impossible things kept pouring out of the mouth of this perfectly ordinary, calm middle-aged man.
If anyone else had said this, we would have suspected him immediately. But after seeing his coding test results, we had no choice but to believe him.
“Then what do you think about this code?”
At that point, Seo Jeongwon brought up our product development screen on his laptop.
It wasn’t something we usually did at the interview stage because of security concerns, but this was a part Jeongwon had once spent a lot of time wrestling with.
“Is debugging a second coding test?”
“Not exactly, but your coding test results were so overwhelming that I’m asking in my own curiosity. We’re dealing with a situation where a problem has come up while processing a large X-ray image dataset.”
“Ah, yes.”
Youngsu studied the code for a long while, then murmured carefully, “Could the issue be memory usage?”
The way he immediately started typing something threw all of us off for a moment.
It was impressive how he started memory mapping without the slightest hesitation.
This was a fairly complicated question, one that would probably fluster anyone without real field experience, but what fascinated us most was simply how calmly he handled it.
“Batch processing data, hmm. Mm.”
He kept muttering to himself while making adjustments, and he looked exactly like a senior developer.
“This may take a little while.”
His understanding of data flow and memory management was far beyond what we had expected.
“Ah. That’s fine. Would it be all right if we take a look at just the parts you’ve worked on so far?”
“Yes.”
Seo Jeongwon quietly stared at the revised code on his own.
We didn’t know what the original code looked like, so we just watched Jeongwon’s reaction in silence.
“By any chance, when could you start working?”
“Jeongwon-nim? Just a moment.”
Judging by that reaction, we might really end up hiring someone absurdly unbelievable.
Still, we decided to calm down first and have a more concrete conversation.
“You’ve mainly worked on web-based coding. Do you think you’d be able to adapt well to our software?”
“Yes. If I learn, I think I can do well.”
“If we asked you to handle HR-related coding like what you built at your previous company, how would you feel about that?”
At my question, all the employees who had joined the interview looked at me with surprised expressions.
A genius developer joining us? Great.
But someone with more than ten years of HR experience building HR-related programs for us would be useful to the company in the long run too.
So I was asking just in case.
“As long as I can work alongside TA Medical’s AI development, that would be fine. I’ve spent so long in HR that there are quite a few things I’ve always wanted to build.”
But the answer we got was even better than I expected.
“By the way, does that mean I might not be a good fit for the AI development side?”
“Not at all. It’s just that your HR background is so strong that I thought we could get a lot of useful advice from you. We’d be grateful just to have you join us as one of our product developers.”
At my answer, Youngsu couldn’t hide his smile and broke into a broad grin.
“Would it be all right if I mainly handled work different from the job posting, spent a month on handover, and then took another month to rest before coming in properly?”
“As much as you want.”
And just like that, the first-round interview ended in perfect shape.
Seo Jeongwon, who had clearly wanted to hire Youngsu, looked a little disappointed, but perhaps because he was also handling HR-related miscellaneous work, he gave up on Youngsu quickly.
The second-round interview, held over video, ended in no time at all, and Youngsu’s hiring was confirmed right away.
“Then Youngsu-nim will be directly under Siwon-nim?”
“Depending on how the hiring gets arranged, he might also back up the development team a bit.”
“Tsk. That’s hard to split up into separate projects. Let’s see how the hiring goes and talk after that.”
In the end, we decided to make Youngsu’s main role software related to HR work, with development duties only as a real side responsibility.
That was because Youngsu himself had shown ambition first.
He said he wanted to handle a variety of tasks until the day he retired.
If you make that kind of insane offer to the other candidates, I’ll reset your computer. 🙄
Of course, Badugi chewed me out like crazy for suddenly asking to change his job duties.
“Let’s enjoy the other interviews too. More people we’d want to work with are going to keep showing up.”
“It would be fun working with ten geniuses, wouldn’t it?”
The developers, who had been lukewarm about hiring before, were now full of anticipation.
Youngsu was already covering HR for us like this.