The Last Seven Months: Scattered Thoughts (September 2024 to March 2025)

Opening

I haven’t written a single retrospective since August. Between September and March, more than half a year slipped past with my body and mind both out of shape. No goals, no retros, and I can say with some confidence it was the worst stretch I’ve had in years. The health I’d built up over the summer fell apart, and my head wasn’t in a great place either. Now that I’ve finally decided to reset the problems that were chewing away at my life, I figured it was time to write something about what I’ve been through. Calling it a retrospective feels like a stretch, and it doesn’t live up to the monthly records I used to keep, but compared to an annual review the cadence is still short, so I’ll take that as consolation and just set down whatever comes out, in no particular order.

Married Life

September was when the B2G project at work finally wrapped up for the season. Looking back, I worked through the summer without even noticing it was hot. At the time all I wanted was a short break to enjoy the relief of being done. Over Chuseok, my wife and I got what passed for a blessing from both sets of parents and flew off to Switzerland and France, hoping the trip would repair the long stretch I’d burned through at the company. But by then we’d already been newlyweds for the first half of 2024 (half a year during which work was pretty much all my life was), and each of us had been holding on in our own separate ways. That time wasn’t something a single European trip could undo. Truthfully, that was the moment I should have come to my senses, but back then I was just full of resentment. I think the only thing running in my head was I was just trying my best, and look where it got me. In the end, recovering took another six full months. The saving grace is that we’re at least moving in the direction of recovery, and that’s entirely thanks to my wife’s resolve, her patience, and her effort. The process was brutal for both of us, of course.

Work

No matter how much meaning I tried to layer onto it, the B2G project was, to me, just outsourced work. The government had put out a pass-or-fail guideline, and that guideline was vague enough that the whole game became: interpret it however you can and squeeze out extra points. There was no customer in the room, no end user. Just the government trying to ram a half-baked policy through in a hurry, and the incumbents in the market angling to clear the bar. For us to play the game at all, we had no choice but to partner with those incumbents, and we finished the product through a tug-of-war with fuzzy guidelines and requirements from partners that made no sense. The real push started in May 2024, but we’d been pouring resources into it since September 2023. As of April 2025, the team and I had spent nearly a year and a half on it.

“Startups shouldn’t do outsourced work”? I’m not trying to chase that kind of idealism. Business is business. Startup or not, it doesn’t matter. When your in-house product is going through a slump, turning to outsourced work is the natural move for a startup that’s running out of cash. Years ago, at a dinner with Song Jae-kyung, then CEO of XL Games (I think he’s since left), he told stories about the early days at Nexon building The Kingdom of the Winds, and he mentioned that everyone on the team except him was doing homepage contracting on the side.

Anyway, I’m drifting. The point is that to move forward, sometimes you have to do work you don’t want to do. That’s what running a business is. But that’s not what I’m getting at either. If this had been straight contract work, we’d have gotten a down payment when the project kicked off and a final payment when it wrapped, as fast as possible. If it had been in-house product work, we could’ve given up short-term revenue and aimed for something bigger. But when a project is really just a handful of stakeholders’ requirements dressed up as something more, the right move for a startup with its own product is to knock it out fast, collect, and get out.

We spent a year and a half on it. Because it was B2G, it was meaningfully harder than ordinary outsourcing, but we met every requirement and delivered a good result. No down payment. No final payment. Passing the B2G review just gave us the right to enter the market and try to sell the product. The thing is, the pass criteria didn’t reflect what the market actually wanted. To actually sell, we’d have a mountain of real development still ahead of us. And to make matters worse, the December 2024 South Korean martial-law declaration kicked in, and public sentiment around policy, already shaky, got even worse. The sliver of return we’d been hoping for in 2025 vanished entirely.

The thing about startups is that you can’t really run a Plan B. You stare at Plan A and throw yourself at it like a lunatic, and when the slim odds of success do arrive, you’re the one who can move faster and bigger than anyone else. So it’s very easy, after the fact, to talk about these kinds of outcomes with hindsight. In the moment, you can’t know anything. When a crisis comes, you cut and cut and hold on until the next chance shows up. From a startup point of view, that call is completely natural.

But the people going through it with you have a rough time. Decisions you believed were the best turn out wrong, and wrong decisions hit every part of an employee’s life, financially and mentally and everything else. If you don’t want to go through that process with the company, leaving quickly is the right answer. No one will blame you for it. No one has the standing to. That said, since these aren’t collective decisions, the company has to clearly share how things got here and where things stand right now. That’s what communication means.

And honestly, from where management sits, that’s about all you can do. You give the information, and then you give people the room to make their own calls. Stay or go. That’s the best thing for everyone. The ones leaving get well-wishes for the road ahead, and the ones staying lock in together and try to turn the crisis into something. The company has to be able to ask for that.

But the absence of communication strips all of that away. From both sides. The hardest spot of all is the middle manager with no information, no authority, and no answers for a team that’s waiting for one. Powerless. Useless. You try to hold yourself together and do what you can, but eventually you break. What more could I have done? Honestly, I don’t know.

Back then, I hated it all: the teammates who didn’t know what I was dealing with, and the executives too. The moment I caught wind of things said behind my back, in their own little circles, something in me bruised. There was nothing I could do about any of it, and maybe the comments weren’t even aimed at me, but they all sounded like accusations. I was treating the company’s problems and the company’s responsibilities as if they were mine to absorb. I think that’s what being a leader is, though. Whatever the situation, you stay on the hook until the end.

But after long enough with no information and no authority, I hit the wall. Every business decision was being made upstream, we were getting dragged along, building only what was handed to us. The same pattern, again. There was no “here’s how we’re going to improve things,” no “let’s communicate better.” Just the same old way, heading somewhere I couldn’t see, forward for the sake of forward.

At first I thought maybe it was just my department, that I wasn’t doing a good enough job and that’s why we were the isolated island. But when I looked around, every department was an isolated island. If anything, the information I had was coming in a little faster than elsewhere. The moment I realized this wasn’t going to improve, and the moment I realized the people with me had stopped expecting anything from the company (and from me, by then), I decided to stop.

Month-by-Month Work Summary

• September
  • Project submitted. At that point the company was saying we’d refocus on the in-house product, so I started setting up an objective-based squad structure and cleared the B2G product off my plate, tired of it as I was.
• October
  • We were suddenly told a global-business project was starting, but I tuned it out and focused on the B2G product’s post-review corrections. I think I just wanted it to be over.
• November
  • The B2G product passed review. Since scoring was per content item rather than platform-level, some items failed, but more than half passed.
  • Around this time we reorganized quickly into an in-house product squad and began planning and building new tasks.
  • The period wasn’t easy, but because we were centered on in-house product work, it was at least fun.
• December
  • Back to the B2G product. We were told in November there’d be a resubmission schedule for the items that failed, and there were new partners involved. Every time it’s the same story: we’re told there won’t be any additional development, and every time, once you open it up, the spec dump is just as heavy as the previous half-year’s. In the end, as the first round of in-house squad work wrapped, I had to pull the B2G product back in.
• January
  • The squads were nominally set up around the in-house product, but we were clearly going to have to do the B2G work no matter what, and that needed a plan. Running retros with the team leads, I realized how much we’d been letting slide under the cover of “we’re busy.” We reorganized the squads by business line (global, B2G, new in-house) and gave team members formal titles. I think I was trying to carry the thing on personal effort, whatever the company was doing.
• February
  • I thought the new squad structure would let us move sharply, but in the end none of it was really clicking. The underlying problem was the same. Three squads whose contexts barely overlapped, and I couldn’t properly delegate any of them, so I ended up not really knowing any of them well enough.
• March
  • I sat with the question of how to spend the time ahead, what I was actually hoping to get out of this place, and once I weighed everything I realized the person who should have left was me. The right moment would have been the moment people here stopped expecting anything from me, and even that window had already closed. I’d come this far on a shabby sense of duty, but once I accounted for every opportunity cost, leaving (even now) was the right call. At this point I’m sure of it.

That’s as far as I’ll go on work. I’ll put the full company retrospective in a separate post. A rough six months doesn’t mean every memory from it was bad, not even close.

Personal (Health, Reading, Other)

With my head in a dark place, my routines fell apart, and the times I tried to burn off the bad mood with overly hard workouts, injury caught up with me. The injury made it harder to go to the gym, and I’m still in recovery mode. When my mental state is off and I can’t exercise, stress relief slides back into food, and body and mind both kept deteriorating for a while. It’s only recently that I’ve been seeing a doctor consistently and keeping up rehab.

The symptom I’m most worried about is reading. For six months I basically stopped. Even in the busiest stretches I’d never put books down like that, but this time I just stopped. Without input, you burn out. I guess that’s what was happening to me, quietly.

As I mentioned, my wife and I had a rough stretch, and one of the things we tried was traveling. France and Switzerland, but also Cebu, Osaka, Kyoto. Whenever the schedule allowed, we tried to get as far away as possible and spend some good time together. There were hard days, since we were in the middle of fighting a lot, but in the end I think they were trips worth taking. They helped more than I expected. What I remember most isn’t the famous tourist spots. It’s the two of us walking down ordinary streets, talking about nothing in particular.

Closing

This isn’t a retrospective, and it isn’t really a record of that stretch of time either. Too scattered to be a retro. Too scattered to be a record.

My difficulty might be nothing to someone else. I’m not writing this to get public agreement that what I went through was hard. I’m writing it because, in the middle of these tangled, unresolved thoughts, I somehow made the next choice (the kind of choice that probably needed a good bit of courage) and stumbled into something new by backing away. This is a record of how I was backing away.

Life keeps handing you an easy choice and a hard choice and forcing you to pick one. That’s the cruel part. And the answer has always been the harder one. I chose the harder path because it was the harder one. Whatever mess the company is in, staying there is the easier call for me. I’d regret it if I backed down, so since I was already stepping backward, I figured I’d step onto a new road instead. I’m not trying to push the harder path on anyone else. Everyone has their own best answer.

I’ll leave the concrete plans for what comes next, and the four-year retro on my time at the company, for other posts.

All that is gold does not glitter Not all those who wander are lost The old that is strong does not wither Deep roots are not reached by the frost From the ashes a fire shall be woken A light from the shadows shall spring Renewed shall be blade that was broken The crownless again shall be king

⁃ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

• Previous retrospective
  • Blood, Sweat, and Melancholy (July & August 2024)
• Next retrospective
  • Four-Year Retrospective at IHFB