Applying for jobs in Seoul while sitting on a local bus in Daegu

The awkward transition from Daegu to Seoul

I’ve been living in Daegu for a while now, working a steady job that I landed back in 2021. It’s not terrible, but there’s this constant pull toward Seoul if you want to be anywhere near the core tech scene. I’m a 94-liner, which somehow feels like the middle of nowhere age-wise—not quite fresh out of university, but definitely not established enough to stop worrying about money. I spend a lot of time on buses here, and honestly, those rides are where most of my career anxiety happens. Last week, I was scrolling through job listings on my phone, cramped in a seat on a 45-seater bus, and realized that my life has basically become a sequence of waiting for the next stop and waiting for a recruiter to email me back.

Trying to figure out the support systems

I started looking into what kind of help is actually out there for someone in my position. People kept mentioning things like the ‘Seoul Young Tech’ program, which offers free financial planning for people living in the city, but then I hit a wall. I’m still officially a Daegu resident. I’m currently in that weird limbo state where I’m flying up to Seoul for interviews on weekends, paying about 70,000 to 100,000 won for a KTX round trip each time, but I don’t have a local address yet. It feels a bit like I’m trying to jump onto a moving train that hasn’t let me into the station yet. You want the support, but the eligibility criteria feel like they were designed for someone who already has their life perfectly synced with the city’s administrative requirements.

The reality of the big tech narrative

Everyone reads these articles about the ‘Park Min-woo division’ at Hyundai or some high-profile engineer jumping ship from a major tech giant to an AI startup, and it sounds so clean. Like it’s just a strategic move on a chessboard. But looking at my own situation, it’s mostly just me trying to explain gaps in my resume or why I’m looking to relocate to a city where the cost of living is triple what I’m used to. I’ve gone through two job changes already, and each time, it’s less about ‘building a division’ and more about trying to find a place that doesn’t feel like a dead end. Sometimes I wonder if these big, public tech industry departures are actually making it harder for people like me—it creates this hype where employers expect you to have some sort of ‘genius’ trajectory rather than just being someone who wants to work in a better environment.

The endless waiting room

I had an interview last Tuesday at a mid-sized firm in Gangnam. I arrived thirty minutes early because I was terrified of being late in that unfamiliar traffic. I sat in a lobby that smelled faintly of expensive coffee and floor wax. The reception area had a stack of company brochures that looked like they hadn’t been touched in months. I just kept checking my phone, making sure I didn’t have any notifications from my current boss that I needed to attend to. The waiting duration was nearly forty minutes. It’s funny how you spend weeks preparing for a conversation that ends up lasting less than half an hour. You walk out, the humidity in Seoul hits you, and you realize you’re right back where you started—just a person on a platform waiting for the train to take you back to Daegu, not really knowing if you actually want to move or if you’re just tired of the stagnation here.

The lingering uncertainty

Even after a few interviews, I don’t feel like I have a handle on this. Will I really move? I have a savings goal, and every time I pay for that KTX ticket, it feels like I’m chipping away at the fund that’s supposed to help me settle in the new city. I’ve seen people talk about how the ‘psychological barrier’ to quitting and trying something new has lowered, but that hasn’t been my experience. It’s still just as nerve-wracking to think about giving up a stable commute for the unknown stress of a high-pressure office in a city where I don’t even have a place to sleep yet. Maybe I’m just overthinking the logistics instead of focusing on the actual work, but it’s hard not to when you’re staring at a bank balance that’s barely moving.