Management

How to Overcome the Limits of Time and Scale Up

created: 2024.08.03. 15:41 · modified: 2024.08.04. 12:38 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

I’m starting graduate school this fall. I’m returning to my alma mater and undergraduate major, KAIST’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, two years after leaving Daejeon at the end of spring 2022, which was effectively my final semester. I had plenty of doubts and worries before deciding to go, and even now I’m half excited and half anxious. But that’s a story for another time, since it isn’t what I want to write about today.

Naturally, I’ve decided to leave my job in mid-to-late August. I’ll only be stopping my full-time, in-office work, though; I plan to continue doing the same work remotely and part-time. As the company’s only developer, I’ve already been doing most of it on my own, so switching to remote work shouldn’t be a major problem. I’d welcome the extra income, since I can’t expect to earn much as a graduate student. The company, meanwhile, would have a hard time finding someone as well suited to the work as I am, and hiring someone would take resources for a handover. Our interests align, which is what makes this possible. The arrangement is being considered quite favorably, but we still need to negotiate my pay under the new arrangement. It’s also possible that I’ll be so busy from my very first semester of my master’s program that I won’t have time for a side job at all.

It’s now been a full seven months since I joined the company at the beginning of the year. I’m quite busy even now. Until around the middle of this year, I could more or less set my own pace. But the in-house software I’ve been developing was slated for use in the semiannual sales reporting process starting in July, which gave the work a deadline. Since the rollout began, I’ve also had to fix small bugs and add features while making sure employees can keep using it without disruption. And now that I know how things work at the company, I’m given all sorts of miscellaneous tasks I didn’t have when I first joined.

I recently picked up a freelance programming job, too. After discussing the scope and pay, I signed the contract just four days ago. Since then, I’ve been working on it whenever I can after work on weekdays and today, over the weekend.

Amid all this, the company asked me to revamp its website. That would clearly be extra work beyond my main job of developing in-house software, so I thought I could reasonably ask for additional pay. If they’d agreed, the usual me would have worked overtime to get it done.

But I turned it down. Not because the pay was too low, but because I didn’t have enough time. My main job and the freelance work already fill my days, and there are plenty of things in life I need to attend to besides earning money.

Time is what matters most to me these days. More than anything else, I often feel that I simply don’t have enough hours. I wish either I could have two bodies or a day could have 48 hours.

I’ve felt this way before, but the reason I want it so badly now is that the rewards of having more time have never been so visible. As an undergraduate, even if I’d spent twice as long on assignments or studying for exams, there was no telling whether my class rank would have improved by half. But if I had twice as much time now, I’m almost certain I could earn more than twice as much.

It really troubles me that the one thing keeping me from doing more is the one resource I can’t increase no matter what I do. Well, there is one thing that’s recently had much the same effect as giving me more time: LLMs. They’re mentioned so relentlessly amid the AI hype that some people may recoil at the term by now, but I’ve genuinely benefited enormously from them. Programming seems particularly well suited to LLMs from the outset, since the work consists of inputting and outputting code—plain text—from beginning to end. As I’ve gained experience using them, I’ve also developed ways to communicate with the models to get the best results. My productivity has increased by at least 50%. With LLM-based tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, I feel as though I have two bodies.

But this is only an occasional burst of acceleration brought about by rapid technological progress, not something I can choose to make happen. In the end, the only sustainable way to overcome a shortage of my own time is to manage other people—in other words, management. I’ve now developed some expertise in the narrow field of web development, and I’d like to bring other developers onto a team, train and lead them, and take on bigger projects faster than I could alone.

But it isn’t easy. When I develop something on my own, I can set the pace, so I can do it as a side job. The moment I bring other people in, though, we have to maintain a steady pace together, which makes doing it part-time difficult. On the other hand, going into freelance development full-time would mean irregular income and uncertain long-term growth for me. I don’t want to spend my whole working life as a developer, either.

What’s more, even if I were ready to fully commit to team-based freelance work, I’m not sure I have the management skills to run it well. From last year into this year, I tried to start businesses around a series of different ideas. I even worked with small teams along the way. What I came to realize keenly was just how much I lack the ability to lead people.

In fact, I’d sensed that to some extent since childhood. In the lower grades, the class president was usually a child who did well in school and behaved properly—often me. As we got older, I watched those positions go instead to children with a knack for drawing people to them, regardless of their grades. I thought the two abilities were clearly different, and that I wasn’t particularly strong in the latter. So when I got to university, I didn’t even try to run for positions like department representative or club officer. I just watched from a distance.

But if leadership and management are ultimately what it takes to accomplish anything big, I wish I’d put myself out there more and developed those skills. I used to wonder why managers were so highly valued. Now I understand. Maybe management is the ultimate skill. I’ve heard that, in the early modern era, when society was less systematically organized, it was common for generals to leave the military and take on all kinds of important positions because the military was the only place that managed people on a large scale. That makes sense to me. I don’t yet know what form it will take, but if I get opportunities to practice management in graduate school or afterward, I now intend to seize them.

*

When I move down to Daejeon this time, I plan to take a car. Originally, I was only going to drive if I had to live farther from campus to get a larger room for the same rent. But then, thinking about all the above, it occurred to me that a car wouldn’t just be convenient—it would let me buy time. So I announced to my parents, “I’m taking a car down with me.” Apparently, they’d already assumed I would, haha. It may be an aging Matiz, but I feel as though I’ve gained an army of reinforcements.

There was a time when I thought cars cost far too much—tens of millions of won as a starting point—and that I’d rather rent one when I needed it and otherwise take public transit. I’ve completely changed my mind. I think I could put one to such good use that it would more than justify those tens of millions of won. If the Matiz gives out sooner than expected, I might even buy another used car with my own money. I’ve already gotten so much use out of MacBooks costing two to three million won that I don’t regret spending a penny on them. Maybe a car will be the next thing I feel that way about.