My infrastructure career didn’t start in a straight line, and it didn’t start in a single country either. Here’s the actual path, and what I learned moving through it.
The Path
I graduated with a computer science degree from a national university outside Seoul, but didn’t land on my feet in the Korean job market afterward — nothing came together the way a new CS grad hopes it will. So instead of building a career in Korea first, I went straight to Germany and built it there instead: 12 years, starting in user support and eventually moving into IT infrastructure administration, including security work.
Before making the move to the US, I spent about five months back in Korea specifically to pick up cloud operations skills — a deliberate stop to retool, not a return to where I’d left off. From there, I moved to the US, where I’ve spent the last year in a server infrastructure admin role.
Three countries, but really more like three distinct chapters — and the order wasn’t as tidy as “Korea, then Germany, then America.”
Each move wasn’t just a change of address. It was a change in what “doing infrastructure work” actually meant day to day.
Germany: Long Cycles, Small Moves
The Korean-affiliated companies I worked for in Germany tended to be cautious about big equipment purchases — partly company size, partly how dependent their setup was on a parent structure elsewhere. Large projects were rare. Maintaining the status quo, or making small incremental improvements, was usually enough to satisfy leadership. Maintenance cycles were long — checking in on a system once a year was often sufficient.
The US: Shorter Cycles, More Independence
The US side of the same kind of company looks different, even under the same parent umbrella. Legal entities here tend to prefer standalone setups over dependent ones, which means larger projects come around more often. Maintenance cycles are shorter, and there’s simply more that needs regular attention. It’s a faster pace, with more autonomy per site — and more responsibility that comes with that autonomy.
The Hardest Transitions
Moving from Korea to Germany, the hardest part was the language barrier and doing it completely alone — no existing connections, everything learned from scratch.
Moving from Germany to the US was a different kind of hard. I wasn’t single anymore — there was a family to move, more belongings to plan around, and decisions about where to live that had to account for a family’s future, not just a job’s requirements. Logistics I’d never had to think about the first time around became the main challenge the second time.
A Note on Workplace Culture
This is just my own experience, not a rule about entire countries, but the pattern I noticed: in Germany, things looked outwardly polite and professional, but what people actually thought was often hard to read — office politics ran under the surface more than out in the open. In the US, what you see tends to be closer to what you get; people are more direct about where they stand. In Korea, group lines are usually clear — you know who’s “your side” and who isn’t. In Germany, the surface message was more often “we’re all on the same team,” even when the undercurrent said otherwise.
What Stayed the Same
Through all three countries, the actual technical skills carried over — DNS is DNS, VMware is VMware, no matter which company logo is on the badge. What changed was everything around the technical work: how decisions get made, how much autonomy you’re given, and how far ahead you’re expected to plan. If you’re considering a similar move, the tech will travel with you. Be ready for everything else to reset.
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The California-to-Georgia move also meant redoing my E-2 visa from scratch — here’s what happened when I picked it up with just 10 hours to spare before my flight
If you want the practical side of that move, I wrote separately about opening a bank account and building credit from scratch as a new immigrant.