I thought jumping to a bigger tech company would be the fix

When the resume update feels like a chore

I spent an entire weekend updating my LinkedIn profile, which I hadn’t touched in nearly two years. It felt like I was writing fiction. You try to translate your daily grinding at a medium-sized office into these bullet points that sound like you single-handedly saved the product line. Looking at the job listings for companies like Kakao or the ones people refer to as the big tech players, everything seems so polished. They talk about ‘AI-driven growth strategies’ and ‘digital asset platforms’ where the average salary hits over 200 million won. Then there is me, still trying to explain why a project deadline slipped by three weeks because of a server migration that wasn’t properly documented.

The strange reality of RSU and retention packages

I remember hearing about how Apple allegedly started throwing tens of thousands of dollars in stock grants at their top engineers just to stop them from even looking at other companies. It sounds like a dream until you realize that if you’re on the receiving end of that, you’re basically locked in a golden cage. I have a friend who got one of those packages, and now they seem more stressed about the vesting schedule than the actual work. It’s funny how a company tries to prevent the pain of turnover by essentially bribing you into staying. It makes you wonder if they’re actually investing in the culture or just paying a ‘don’t leave’ fee to buy themselves more time.

Why verifying AI outputs is becoming a real job

Lately, I’ve been reading about how some U.S. tech firms might be faking their high productivity rates by leaning too hard on AI tools that nobody is actually auditing. It hit home because, at my current place, someone pushed to integrate an AI writing assistant into our team’s workflow. It was supposed to save us hours, but I spent half of my Tuesday cleaning up the weird, repetitive phrasing it generated in our release notes. It’s like we’re hiring these high-skill developers, but they spend more time acting as editors for faulty software than actually building things. If the big tech giants are doing this on a larger scale, I’m not sure the ‘high-skill vacancy rate’ really reflects what’s happening on the ground.

The small print of taxes when moving around

I didn’t expect the tax side of switching jobs to be this annoying. When I moved from my first company to the second one, I got a notice from the tax office about some miscellaneous income I had completely forgotten about. It was something minor—maybe a small referral bonus or an app event reward from a few years ago—but it meant I had to file everything manually. I remember spending about two hours on a Tuesday night digging through old emails just to find a record of a 50,000 won payment. You focus on the salary increase and the prestige of the new name on your business card, but nobody tells you that you’ll spend your first month at the new desk dealing with government paperwork and weird tax gaps from your previous employment periods.

Is the grass even greener

Sometimes I look at these ‘wellness centers’ that big IT firms boast about, like those fancy cryotherapy rooms, and I think it’s all just a bit much. I’d take a shorter commute or a slightly less aggressive management style over a high-tech nap pod any day. There’s this constant pressure to hop to the next biggest company because everyone says that’s how you get the real pay bumps. But then I see my friends who moved to those places complaining about the same old office politics, just with better coffee and longer hours. I’m still not sure if leaving for the next ‘big thing’ is a strategy or just a cycle I’ve been conditioned to follow. Maybe I’ll stay put for a few more months, or maybe I’ll update my resume again next weekend. I haven’t decided yet.