"I Gave Up on Escaping": Why Office Workers Are Obsessed With "Investing" Instead [Special]

"Let's Stay Put Where We Are": Office Workers Playing It Safe

The number of search keywords related to job changes or resignations has been steadily decreasing since 2021.

Q. People must be feeling a lot of anxiety that it would be difficult to leave now and find a better place.

One common phenomenon observed in both the U.S. and South Korea is that when people wanted to leave Big Tech to change jobs, moving to another Big Tech firm was a good option, but joining a fast-growing startup also offered plenty of choices to take on a certain level of risk for greater future gains.

The reason those options could exist was because many investors invested in a wide variety of services. Recently, however, a clear trend has emerged where venture capital and other investment institutions focus almost exclusively on AI and robotics while neglecting other areas. This is true in both Korea and the U.S. As a result, the options available to departing employees have shrunk. These factors seem to be why people are changing jobs less often.

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What Skyrocketed Instead of Looking Into 'Job Changes'..
Q. If you look at economic articles these days, Blind investors are frequently cited. Discussions about stocks on Blind, real estate stories from Blind, and stories about Samsung Electronics monthly rent originating from Blind often end up as key keywords in economic articles.

Keywords like real estate, stocks, and crypto appeared among the top 10 most searched keywords by office workers this year, with search volumes for these keywords growing anywhere from 15% to as much as 320% compared to last year. Fears that wealth cannot be achieved through office life alone, or that office life itself may not be sustainable, seem to have created these phenomena.


"This 'Tsunami' Is Real.. What's Needed to Survive"

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Q. Looking at the corporate environment changing due to AI from the front lines through Blind, how should entry-level workers live moving forward?

It feels like an era of overwhelming uncertainty. I experienced the period when the internet first started and also when the paradigm shifted to mobile, but I feel this era has far greater uncertainty than any of those times. Back then, there were logical predictions about how industries would develop, and growth followed one of those predictions. However, in today's AI era, we live in a chaotic period where such predictions themselves are meaningless and no one can provide the right answer.

At times like this, information seems to be the most important thing. It feels like the only way to reduce future uncertainty and minimize risk is to carefully listen to the voices of people experiencing the choices I am contemplating, those currently working at the companies I want, and people "in the field" walking the paths I wanted to take, and to think more deeply based on that.

Q. It makes me think that networking might become much more important than in the past.

Yes, exactly. I mentioned that it is important to ask people who have walked the path you wanted to take. In the past, it probably sufficed to ask senior college majors or acquaintances. Because there are so many diverse cases nowadays, it is crucial to listen to the voices of a much wider variety of people, but from the standpoint of college or graduate students, it is actually not easy to possess such a broad network.

For that reason, we brought college students into Blind to provide them with a platform for conversation. Moving forward, activities to gather information diversely through larger networks—breaking away from the personal networks one previously held, beyond just such services—seem necessary.
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.