Will taking a job in one sector set my career path
Hey I’ve been pretty luck last week and I managed to get 2 job offers.
One is a good gig at a massive, old school financial group. I’m talking I have to wear a suit and tie. My biggest worry though is the tech is old and my coworkers and higher ups don’t seem bleeding edge so I doubt I’ll be flexing my developer muscles. Plus they have a volleyball intramural league
The other company is contracted for 6 months with a really cool tech IoT company. Job through Insight Global, Full remote, Has amazing Glassdoor reviews, cool projects, I crushed their technical interview so I feel like I can actually contribute.
I’m leaning towards the financial group because money matters and I want to feel secure.
What I’m worried about is after 2 years I’ll be 27 and I’m scared that working as a SWE for a financial group won’t look as good so I’ll never be able to work on a project that I’m passionate about again
Any advice?
27 is still pretty young all things considered. If you don’t have a family to support then I say take the risk and go where your heart takes you
Second this, and you’ll likely make connections that will help you in the long run.
Op, I’ve been in your shoes. If you don’t have a wife and kids, take the risk and follow your heart. You’ll be glad you did.
Yeah, I remember doing a pretty standard software eng internship for a cloud services company one summer back in undergrad, and I just found it so dull and uninteresting. It wasn’t even the company’s fault, as the team was great, good work-life balance, and good pay. I just realized through that internship that I truly did not want to work in cloud services or as a bog standard software eng.
Much happier now working as a research engineer in embedded systems, as it’s a field I find genuinely interesting. When you’re young is exactly the time to try to figure out what actually interests you and try to go do that. Spending all day every day writing code to solve problems you find fundamentally uninteresting is a quick route to burnout.
Seriously, I think this is excellent advice. I was in the video game industry and started out at a mid size company. It was the best time of my life. Out of university I took a position at a big publisher and quickly rose up. I was miserable though. The money didn’t make up for the way I felt. If I could go back in time I would have lowered my asking and gone with a small outfit.
It’s really up to what you value most I would say. Personally I work to live, and all of my passions are outside of work, even if they are programming-related. I get paid ridiculous money doing BS work at some corporate company doing nothing for the world, and I’m okay with that. If you would rather do something cool and innovative for a company and put in a lot of effort that would potentially only be compensated by the knowledge and experience that you gain, that’s also an option. It all depends on what you want your career to look like.
Semi-related, please learn about Boglehead investing while you’re young and stuff all your phat programmer money into the right places. You could retire by the time you’re ~40, and that may shape your expectation of what you want your full career to be.
You’re 25, unless your dream job is social media manager, you have 10+ years before anyone starts using your age against you. No matter which job you take, you can always pivot, just spend a few minutes crafting a narrative.
You can learn at any company. The financial company is going to give you a lot of space to learn process and compliance, and probably be infuriatingly slow, but you’ll probably come out with a different opinion about risk. The IoT start up is probably going to let you have more independence and playing with rando tech, and you will learn more about work life balance and your own working habits there.
If you’ve never worked remote, take the contract and see how much that flex is worth to you monetarily. You might be surprised. I would rather rub shit in my hair than wear a suit to an office everyday. But then again, maybe you love volley ball that much.
just to give an argument for the option most folks are not choosing.
I work for a huge old company and here are some of the benefits:
- Good pay
- Great work/life balance. putting in over 40hrs/week is unheard of, no crunch time
- Size of the company allows for movement to different tech areas
- Very stable, great job security
Now granted, we are totally WFH, don’t think I would be willing to do an in-person job with a suit every day, but there is an argument to make for making more money when you’re younger that you can start investing early.
The lack of bleeding edge tech could also be used to your advantage if you could spearhead leading a more modern initiative.
I’m not sure how large the pay difference is, but it sounds like your heart is leaning towards the start up.
In the end, you’ll just have to weigh the positives and negatives and figure out what you truly want.
Make a SWOT analysis for each option. Quantify EVERYTHING you can into personally objective and subjective values. Then A/B all of those values against each other. Then sleep on it, ask other people, and then return to the SWOT tables and try to add and simplify.
If you still have troubles after that, try to figure out what about either choice you don’t know, and work to find it out with footwork and socializing, asking pointed questions, and paying attention to the things you want in life about people.
If that still doesn’t tip the scale, it’s probably because you don’t know enough about something else, probably yourself.
