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  "path": "/chaesang/trade-off-the-first-word-i-was-told-to-carry-for-life-2mjk",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-29T05:13:01.000Z",
  "site": "https://dev.to",
  "tags": [
    "career",
    "computerscience",
    "programming",
    "learning",
    "brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/32"
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  "textContent": "**Before I understood what engineering was, a professor handed me a word to look up in a dictionary. I've been using it ever since.**\n\n_A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now._\n\n###  Engineering, before I knew the word\n\nIn Korea, boys in middle school took a subject simply called \"Technology,\" and high schools offered an elective called \"Industrial Arts.\" Mine taught \"Commerce\" instead — so my entire pre-college image of engineering came down to a screwdriver, a few nails, and an AM radio kit I'd soldered together. No Lego that I can recall, but I remember playing with science kits, and blowing my allowance on Academy plastic models. The closest thing to \"advanced study\" was learning to read resistor values off their color bands — black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white. That was the whole of my hardware education.\n\nI walked into a computer engineering department without ever really asking myself what engineering was. What I noticed first, honestly, was the gender ratio: about one in ten classmates was a woman, which — after six years in all-boys middle and high schools — was its own small culture shock. Having women as classmates and seniors at all felt like news.\n\n###  The first word\n\nOur first major course was \"Introduction to Computer Engineering,\" which in practice meant learning C. We could finally touch the machines at school; you did your homework in Turbo C and handed it in on a floppy.\n\nI can't forget Professor Sang Lyul Min, one of the second class our department ever graduated. One day he said, \"Let me give you a few fundamental words you'll need for the rest of your life.\" The first was _trade-off_. This was before the internet was something you could just search, so I went home and dug it out of a Korean–English dictionary, like a piece of slang I'd never heard.\n\nFrom that one word I learned three things at once: that there's no free lunch; that this is exactly where engineering parts ways from science; and why the comparison with mathematics would keep coming back. The further I went into my career — and the more decisions I had to actually own — the more that word kept surfacing.\n\n###  The word that kept coming back\n\nIt showed up in my algorithms course, the moment we started weighing time complexity against space complexity. It showed up again and again as I began reading papers, as a way of making sense of the world. If someone asked me today what engineering is — or made me pick a single word for it — I wouldn't hesitate.\n\nI'd say: _trade-off_.\n\n_Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/32_",
  "title": "Trade-off: The First Word I Was Told to Carry for Life"
}