Digital Heroes: Guide to IT World

Where Did the Line Between IT Professionals and Business Users Go? A Small Sense of Crisis I Felt in My Eighth Year as a Professional Wow! My conversation with the customer felt more like a system design review than a business meeting! It was my eighth year as a working professional. I could already see my ninth year approaching. By then, I had spent years building business applications as a systems engineer. I listened to customer requirements, designed solutions, developed systems, and delivered implementations. My role was to provide professional IT services to customers. Then one day, a Japanese customer purchased an enterprise software package from a company in London. I joined the implementation project and traveled to London for system training. The training lasted two weeks. It took place around Waterloo, an area known for its concentration of financial institutions and large corporations. At the time, I thought I was there simply to learn a new system. What I actually learned,...

The Reality Check I Faced in London as an Engineer Wow! An engineer who crossed the ocean full of confidence found himself completely lost in front of a system. It was my eighth year with the company. I was traveling to London to attend training for a financial system that one of our customers had purchased. The server engineer, network engineer, and operations engineer were all there as well. And I was the only application engineer. What I was responsible for was not just a business application. It was the entire financial system. A massive platform where countless functions worked together and multiple systems were connected in complex ways. I was highly motivated. I had built many systems before. Java-based three-tier architectures. Web applications. Database design. Interface design. Customer-facing systems. I was confident in my application development skills. "My mission is to understand this entire system and eventually support its development and operations." With tha...

The Shock of “Engineers Who Don’t Code” What!? There are people who control systems without writing code— In my 7th year as a professional, I joined a large-scale development project with over 200 members as a configuration management leader. With five companies involved, I was responsible for creating various standards and guiding the entire team through structured rules. Among all roles, the one I worked most closely with was the server administrator. Configuration management and server management were the two wheels supporting the project. Naturally, our conversations increased. One day, I casually asked: “How much Java do you usually write?” The answer I got was unexpected. “Actually, I’ve never written it.” The “Language of Scripts” That Runs the Field Surprised, I asked further: “So… you don’t program at all?” He smiled slightly and replied: “Well, I do simple stuff.” What he referred to were shell scripts like Bash and Windows VB scripts. At that moment, the hidde...