Fired? But I Maintain All the Software! Volume 1 Light Novel Review

Ai Sato, a genius engineer with a penchant for cosplay, comes into work one day to find she's been summarily dismissed. Engineers are surplus to requirements, she's told; never mind that Ai single-handedly runs the system that keeps the company going, it's her turn on the chopping block. With the sole maintainer of the All-RaWi system fired, what follows is a textbook case of corporate collapse, as her former company chases cost efficiency over actual results.

Fired? But I Maintain All the Software is translated by Minna Lin.

Ai Sato, a genius engineer with a penchant for cosplay, comes into work one day to find she's been summarily dismissed. Engineers are surplus to requirements, she's told; never mind that Ai single-handedly runs the system that keeps the company going, it's her turn on the chopping block. With the sole maintainer of the All-RaWi system fired, what follows is a textbook case of corporate collapse, as her former company chases cost efficiency over actual results.

Fired? But I Maintain All the Software is translated by Minna Lin.

Fired? But I Maintain All the Software! is unabashedly a corporate revenge fantasy. Ai has witnessed her department be decimated beyond operational ability for years, and now she gets to watch from the outside as the company's ignorant CEO reaps what he has sown. For any reader who has suffered a bad boss - which is likely anyone who has ever worked a job - it's pure adult wish fulfilment.

After a glut of fantasy worker isekai, this mundanity circles right back to feeling innovative. Forget slimes: the dangers here are rounding errors and the Work Style Reform Act.

The story starts in medias res as Ai's immediate manager (a good guy, we'll find out later) tells her their time is up. She has a frankly understandable freak-out about the prospect of being jobless, but thanks to a miraculous encounter with childhood friend Kenta Suzuki, she has a new gig before the end of the chapter. In this economy?

From there, the novel alternates between Ai's cosplaying adventures with her new company and interludes following her former boss. Written as conversations with his secretary, we watch incompetent-extraordinaire President Arata as he crashes and burns before an all-important shareholder meeting. And like all bad bosses, he refuses to take responsibility. As the story progresses, Arata winds up being comically evil and even bordering on stupid, which does detract from his inevitable downfall: it's more satisfying to take down a genius, after all, than watch an idiot flounder in his own mess.

Still, seeing a CEO face consequences for his actions scratches that worker drone itch.

While this split narrative works well, one thing that takes getting used to is where the novel allocates its details. We never really learn what Ai's previous company did, and Kenta's start-up appears to be part coding school, part smart-glasses retailer. They also end up running some kind of engineer networking event. Neither company really makes sense, but I wonder if that's the point: Ai doesn't care what her work is, as long as she is left in peace to do it well. Maybe that's giving author Yuki Kashirome too much credit. Or maybe later volumes will delve into the specifics, but for now it's very much hand-waving to get to the good stuff.

That good stuff, weirdly, includes a detailed description of how syntax works in the Python programming language. As part of Ai's new job, she teaches coding to several desperate adults looking to improve their skills as engineers. If you ignore that she's explaining how to write a program that runs a strip game of chance, the logic behind the demonstration is surprisingly solid. Nobody strips: it's not that kind of novel.

Despite being somewhat detached from reality, Ai is a good teacher, providing her frustrated students with clear instructions that motivate them to solve their own problems. If her methods are unconventional, well, the company is too small to have an HR department.

These client interactions are the strongest part of the premise. The cosplaying shtick feels like it's there to add art to the novel (and will almost certainly be capitalized on in the anime adaptation), but each student that comes to True Coding School is an exploration of different problems working adults face. We're given a busy salaryman who struggles with overtime, a female engineer suffering from gender inequality in the office, and a temp worker desperate to secure permanent work. These aren't fantasy problems. You don't even need to work in tech to appreciate how they affect the characters, because these petty, miserable dilemmas should feel deeply relatable to jaded employees everywhere.

I appreciated that Ai and Kenta didn't solve problems with magic, but with fresh perspectives, professional experience, and good old-fashioned industry connections.

In the end, this first volume reads as a back-to-basics take on the isekai formula found in the likes of Goodbye, Overtime!, only now we've returned to the world of Japanese work culture that the genre originally critiqued. The novel is full of scathing statements about overtime, death marches, and the ruination of work/life balance. So much so, in fact, that I suspect Yuki Kashirome has a few skeletons in the employment closet.

That's not to say it's totally realistic. You'll have to suspend disbelief for the lack of a job search, the CEO shadenfreude, and an influencer being a force for good. Maybe Fired? But I Maintain All the Software! should come with that fantasy tag after all. Either way, I'm going to read the next volume, if only to see where the world of work goes next. Middle managers getting their comeuppance, anyone?