Resignation review

This time it’s an essay to mark a resignation that came around again all too soon. Let’s begin.

I joined AISpera on November 16, 2025. And on June 30, 2026, the day I’m writing this, I resigned.

First, you need to know why I joined AISpera: for what purpose, and with what expectations.

The company I worked at right before AISpera was a small-to-mid-sized company with a fair bit of name recognition among information security service providers. It was a first-generation information security consulting firm, and as befits its long history, it had many major clients it had kept relationships with for years. So it was a company backed by steady revenue, and on the strength of that revenue the CEO and executives pushed ahead with all sorts of investments, but unfortunately none of them ever turned into a proper investment. Also, the existing way of selling had become so entrenched that, instead of competing with rivals on genuinely high-quality technology and services to win contracts, employees like me were being used in a sales approach built on collusion and lobbying.

For the record, I have a chronic illness. There’s one illness that’s hard to cure, no matter how hard I struggle and try.

It’s the illness of pouring my sincerity into everything, and it is both the life that keeps me living and moving forward and something like a death that is killing me.

I feel alive when sincerity meets sincerity. When sincerity meets sincerity, it can create positive synergy, but it can also cause conflict and trouble. But even that trouble lets each side find their differences and directions for improvement and get meaningful results, so I think what you gain outweighs a little trouble. Only then, I think, when people truly collide with each other, do they think and act organically and fulfill their purpose as organic compounds and multicellular animals, befitting the meaning of human existence.

This carries over in the same way to organizations, where people coexist with people.

I think an organization, too, is ultimately one big multicellular animal made up of people, who are multicellular animals themselves. I think each employee’s reason for being is to organically handle the work they’re responsible for on behalf of the one big animal called the organization, and to grow so that the organization survives and heads in a better direction. In the end, to move this big organic life form and keep it alive, each single cell has to take on a role with a purpose. A single cell with no purpose no longer functions and isn’t used, so it is the law of nature that it degenerates and disappears.

Organizations are the same. Among the single cells called employees inside an organization, a cell with no purpose or reason for being is as good as a dead cell, and an organization where such cells are the majority is no different from a dead organization, a dead life.

Back to the main point: to my eyes, my previous company was no different from a dead organization. Most of the employees I dealt with existed in the organization without purpose, simply existing without the thinking and deliberation humans are capable of, doing what a well-trained dog or monkey could do just fine. I didn’t want to fall into a rut myself inside such a dying organization, and in the end I wasn’t satisfied. So I decided to change jobs and took on the challenge of joining a startup, an organization that, in all probability, is light on its feet and young and so moves organically with ease.

When I applied to the organization called AISpera, I had exactly two expectations.

1. Being light on its feet, the organization’s goal would be focused on “growth,” so wouldn’t everyone move the same way under the goal of growing the organization?
2. Being light on its feet, it would keep unnecessary processes and systems to a minimum, so there wouldn’t be any dead cells, right?

Maybe those were vain dreams and expectations I’d pinned on the size of a company called a startup. But unfortunately, AISpera turned out to be completely at odds with my expectations.

Its history was short, yet it was lined with unnecessary legacy policies, processes and systems with neither purpose nor meaning. Unnecessary systems and processes eating away at resources under the phrase “it’s always been this way,” with nobody knowing who created them for what purpose or why we do them. Micromanagement full of distrust, because there was no trust underneath. An environment where everyone knew there was a problem, but the tumor had already grown as big as it could get, and since they knew trying to remove it would hurt themselves and the teams around them, they’d been busy hushing it up and covering it over for years. A situation where people were locked in power struggles within that small organization.

What I saw wasn’t a dead organization but one that was harming itself.

In particular, the meaningless, unnecessary systems and processes that had survived under the phrase “it’s always been this way” were bubbles that would quietly disappear, without anyone even noticing they were gone, the moment someone broke the cycle, bubbles nobody complained about and nobody even knew existed, and they had piled up and up until they were pressing down on the organization’s throat. Something else I found really curious: given how startups work, it’s almost inevitable that many experienced hires from large corporations end up in management positions, and what struck me as really odd was the way they would badmouth the large corporation they had just left, then say “this is how my last company did it” as they tried to bring in and build that very company’s culture and systems. I truly couldn’t understand it. There’s a Korean saying that if a monk doesn’t like the temple, it’s the monk who should leave. A monk who left the temple because he hated it, only to bring in the very same systems and culture and build a second temple, made no logical sense to me at all, which I think is why it struck me as so curious.

The lesson I took from this resignation is that, organic as organizations are, they can exist in truly diverse ways, and I could also confirm a case where an organization, by its nature, can even harm itself. Over eight years of watching from inside various organizations, I’d experienced ones that were more or less alike, but this time I got to experience a completely unexpected new kind of organization, and it was a meaningful experience that showed me there are all sorts of cases, from many angles.

Update, June 30, 2026

“It becomes a problem the moment you recognize the problem as a problem” “Ignorance is not a sin”

Many people abuse these two.

If you talk with them casually when their guard is down, they know and are aware that things are going wrong and that there’s a problem. But no one actually says it out loud within the organization. Because the moment they say it, the risk is too great. The moment you say out loud that there’s a problem, you’re easily branded an irresponsible failure who recognized the problem yet didn’t solve it, or an incompetent failure who recognized the problem yet couldn’t solve it. From the moment it shows that you recognized a problem, responsibility for that problem falls solely on the people who recognized it, while those who didn’t are granted absolution for the sole reason that they were ignorant.

This kind of environment is usually seen a lot in stagnant organizations of entrenched old-timers who work with their mouths rather than their abilities.

In the system those old-timers built, no one raises any problems, so there are no problems, and it looks like an organization running normally and smoothly. But when a new employee who knows nothing walks into that system and raises a problem, all the responsibility is shifted onto the newcomer who raised it. Then the new employee judges that shouldering the responsibility alone is bad for survival, and ends up trapped in the same vicious cycle where nobody raises problems. In the end, the organization is left with nothing but sycophants full of lip service, biting at each other like an ouroboros.

People new to working life probably see a lot of cases like this, and at first it’s easy to fall for the gaslighting of those wily old snakes who have survived 10 or 15 years in society, the “I really didn’t know. There was something like that?”, and to fall into a dilemma: Am I too sensitive? Am I the only one who thinks it’s a problem? But after a few years of working life, there comes a time when you realize those words weren’t said because they truly didn’t know, but are those people’s way of surviving in working life. When I realized that, I was really angry that I’d fallen for that gaslighting. But I took comfort in the fact that out there are also healthy, mature organizations where, if you raise a problem, the responsibility doesn’t all fall on the person who raised it; instead the whole organization takes responsibility and faces the problem squarely and works through it, rather than pointedly ignoring it and covering it up.

I’m nobody special, but if I could say just one thing to people new to working life, I’d ask them not to be frustrated, discouraged or assimilated by the systems the old-timers built, because there are also many people who break those systems and move forward, so never become like them. I have no doubt that only when each and every person breaks out of that cycle can it become the driving force for building a mature and healthy society.