Was Roh Moo-hyun a Developer?

Former President Roh Moo-hyun left a distinctive mark on modern Korean history. This is not a thing of the past. It is still ongoing. There seems to be no need for a lengthy explanation on this point. I, too, have always been deeply interested in this man. My interest has nothing to do with Ilbe.

Interesting from any angle, this man also left behind a mark like the one in the article below. According to this article from the Korea Economic Daily, it appears to be from around 1997.

Based on this article, I have repeatedly seen people argue that Roh Moo-hyun was an outstanding developer. But I always had this doubt. No matter how great a genius someone might be, it would be difficult to work as a lawyer, a politician, and a developer all at the same time. I was curious about the truth, but I never acted on it.

Then, not long ago, I happened to come across Roh Moo-hyun’s essay collection “Honey, Please Help Me” at a used bookstore and snatched it up at once. It is a book written in 1994, ten years before Roh Moo-hyun became a presidential candidate. And I found the piece about the groupware in question.

It clearly states, “(…) I commissioned the program development (…).” From this, it seems that former President Roh Moo-hyun did the planning, but outsourced the actual development. Since this was not so long ago, I imagine there must surely be people who witnessed the whole story of this groupware, but my own abilities fell short and any further investigation was impossible.

Of course, I am not underestimating the planning role that former President Roh Moo-hyun seems to have taken on. People from many different job roles take part in software development. Not only developers, but also planners, analysts and designers, PMs, and so on… Each has their own role to play, and software is completed through everyone’s collaboration. It seems pretty meaningless to rank these roles against one another.

Nor do I want to argue that former President Roh Moo-hyun was completely ignorant of programming. The article and essay above contain no mention whatsoever of his programming skills. That said, given the nature of the industry, it is extremely difficult to carry out planning work if you are completely ignorant of programming. Therefore, one might cautiously speculate that former President Roh Moo-hyun knew how to program.

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I was writing this piece when I ended up stumbling upon former President Roh Moo-hyun’s own testimony. He was indeed a planner. And so this piece is ruined…

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