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?
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.