> I'm shocked, shocked that there is shitty software running in this Samsung establishment.
haha. As someone with some knowledge of Korea, I can add a few pointers. Of course it should NOT be used to paint a broad black/white picture of S Korea or even the state of IT companies in S Korea, but let me try. Please note this is just a personal view.
First, Samsung and other S Korean companies know their weakness is software. They started providing more funding for software majors and Samsung even started a program where they will sponsor (pay salary, provide office space) high school graduates (but not in college yet) to study coding and put out projects over a period of a years (?) all in order to have more more talent get into software.
So WHY this seemingly lack of talent/interest in software building in S Korea's mega corporations? Surely with companies such as Hyundai Motors and Hyundai Shipyards and Samsung memory chips, it shouldn't be that hard to find good software engineers and coders?
I was told one reason is software piracy. It's gotten much better but in the past software piracy was a big issue in SK. I've used/seen many softwares in the past but the only one that ever required a physical dongle for licensing was a Korean Word processor. I had to support it a bit many many years ago. That was the only one with physical dongle for licensing that I've come across. Why the piracy? Well because people didn't have money (or thought didn't have enough money to spend on some intangible thing that requires a fee based upgrade in just a 1 or so). There's a reason linux/opensource is strong in some countries. Some just don't have the money to spend on software.
So due to piracy, a generation of students came to think that software was not a secure career path. Why get into a career to work to build something that can be easily copied at little cost?
Another reason I see is English. Again, it's gotten better with the obscene amount of money the nation as a whole spends on learning English and now other languages. But learning English for S Koreans used to be pretty intimidating. Sure source code is nonsensical alphabets to even native English speakers. Imagine someone learning English for first time starting in middle school with a dozen other subjets to learn. No wonder it was hard to find decent English speaker/writer in S Korea for decades. If you were decent at English, you had other far more prestigous/lucrative career path for you.
One possible reason that the seemingly big/stable corporations in S Korea don't seem to attract good coders is requirement for degree from top school. Getting into good college in S Korea is hard enough. Well, getting into one of the big corporations like Hyundai/Samsung is even more competitive. And we all know the really outstanding programmer/coder/startupers usually didn't have a degree when they started out in programming/IT. Like Jobs, Gates, etc.
I don't think it's piracy that discourages Koreans from seeking a software career. Who's going to pirate the firmware of a smart camera, anyway? Rather, it's the way the culture and industry treats software developers that makes Koreans shudder at the thought of becoming a programmer.
The rapid industrialization of Korea over the last 50 years put a heavy emphasis on hardware: first it was clothes and shoes, then it was cars and TV, and now the focus is on memory chips and displays. Hardware is visible, tangible, easily quantifiable. "We shipped 10 million phones this month!"
But a culture that is obsessed with hardware will often have difficulty appreciating the value of software. Even nowadays, salaries for software developers are often calculated in the same way they calculate the wages for manual laborers [1], and the hourly rate is only around 2x of what manual laborers earn ($200/day vs. $90/day on average). Software is seen as something you do by throwing a bunch of man-hours at it. After all, that's how you've been doing hardware all along.
The same thing seems to happen in Japan, though to a somewhat lesser extent. Sony, for example, isn't exactly known for their world-class software, are they?
I think it's a fine example because practically all Sony software sucks, and whether they wrote it or not, it sucks because the company doesn't understand or value software.
So due to piracy, a generation of students came to think that software was not a secure career path. Why get into a career to work to build something that can be easily copied at little cost?
Wow, this is really interesting - in Russia, piracy was as prevalent, but my gut feeling is that Russian software is far superior to their hardware.
I think that's a function of their strong focus on mathematics and engineering education during the Soviet era (and then CS departments grew as an offshoot of that, I bet).
are they selling Russian software to Russians? if not, beside strong education in the soviet times, it's probably a very good career to sell software to the westerners.
> There's a reason linux/opensource is strong in some countries. Some just don't have the money to spend on software.
I always saw it as an inverse relationship. Once everything is pirated (Windows OS, utilities, games, Photoshop, business software) there is no incentive to adopt open source. Just keep pirating.
haha. As someone with some knowledge of Korea, I can add a few pointers. Of course it should NOT be used to paint a broad black/white picture of S Korea or even the state of IT companies in S Korea, but let me try. Please note this is just a personal view.
First, Samsung and other S Korean companies know their weakness is software. They started providing more funding for software majors and Samsung even started a program where they will sponsor (pay salary, provide office space) high school graduates (but not in college yet) to study coding and put out projects over a period of a years (?) all in order to have more more talent get into software.
So WHY this seemingly lack of talent/interest in software building in S Korea's mega corporations? Surely with companies such as Hyundai Motors and Hyundai Shipyards and Samsung memory chips, it shouldn't be that hard to find good software engineers and coders?
I was told one reason is software piracy. It's gotten much better but in the past software piracy was a big issue in SK. I've used/seen many softwares in the past but the only one that ever required a physical dongle for licensing was a Korean Word processor. I had to support it a bit many many years ago. That was the only one with physical dongle for licensing that I've come across. Why the piracy? Well because people didn't have money (or thought didn't have enough money to spend on some intangible thing that requires a fee based upgrade in just a 1 or so). There's a reason linux/opensource is strong in some countries. Some just don't have the money to spend on software.
So due to piracy, a generation of students came to think that software was not a secure career path. Why get into a career to work to build something that can be easily copied at little cost?
Another reason I see is English. Again, it's gotten better with the obscene amount of money the nation as a whole spends on learning English and now other languages. But learning English for S Koreans used to be pretty intimidating. Sure source code is nonsensical alphabets to even native English speakers. Imagine someone learning English for first time starting in middle school with a dozen other subjets to learn. No wonder it was hard to find decent English speaker/writer in S Korea for decades. If you were decent at English, you had other far more prestigous/lucrative career path for you.
One possible reason that the seemingly big/stable corporations in S Korea don't seem to attract good coders is requirement for degree from top school. Getting into good college in S Korea is hard enough. Well, getting into one of the big corporations like Hyundai/Samsung is even more competitive. And we all know the really outstanding programmer/coder/startupers usually didn't have a degree when they started out in programming/IT. Like Jobs, Gates, etc.
That's my 2 cents.