Comment by neom
9 days ago
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.
9 days ago
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
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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.
Good point! I wasn't treat that as "software" in my answer but it's true that their embedded programming scene is fairly strong.
Embedded electronics, including from those countries, does not have an enviable reputation. :(
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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
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