Ask HN: Career progression vs. meaningful/appealing products? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Career progression vs. meaningful/appealing products?

94 pointsyiiiizzz96 comments

I'm in an interesting situation and would like to know about what others who have faced the same situation have done in the past.

I've been in the market for a new job since spring. At the beginning, I was only focused on products I really liked to (in summary, what a futurist engineer geek would like to: AI, blockchain, security, etc). I had several interviews, but no one struck a deal, either because they decided to move on with other candidates or because I decided to drop off.

Fast forward to mid September, I decided to start applying to positions that suit my role and/or career progression, but in less appealing companies. And I have been very successful. The minimum offer I have received doubles my current salary.

So, I'm in this situation in which I have offers which look positive from a financial and career progression point of view, but in boring products which not interest me at all and which have no upside at all.

Have you ever been in that position? What did you do?

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One thing I feel is worth pointing out is that in my experience a position that seems really interesting because it's in an "interesting" field...might not be.

For example, you see a job posting at AwesomeCorp doing blockchain-based AI security arbitrators, and then you get the job and discover that you're just writing a CRUD app around a bunch of premade solutions glued together, and then you discover the "blockchain" is just an SQL server, but it got investors excited so they stuck with it.

So, sometimes a job in a less sexy field can actually end up being more interesting/challenging, and getting paid more is always nice.

This certainly is true depending on the industry. In ad tech for example, countless companies claim they're using AI to optimize digital campaigns in real time or whatever, when it's just a "dump Google analytics into Google BQ and run regressions". Good companies do exist but you have do really look for them.

I have seen first hand a big old company buying for millions an "automl startup" which was just a simple web interface to pycaret.

Career progression comes naturally when you, at once, work with something you like and it has impact/meaning. You have to find both.

Yeah, back in uni I had a friend really, really good at algorithms. Won international competitions, did lots of cool projects etc. Got offers from multiple of the FAANGs, saying they were interested in utilizing his skills. When he started the job he got assigned to work on the frontend for some ad moderating tool... made good money, though.

Right - in other words, is it fun working at a carnival? Carnivals sure seem fun!

The core mission of almost every company is pretty boring. I think that’s because human needs and wants (which is how companies create value: by meeting them) are old news. People need to eat, move stuff from place to place, talk to their friends, get paid. Big deal. Revolutionizing how those things are done: who cares?

History remembers real revolutionaries, not the people who made it easier to transact on the blockchain.

There are exceptions (SpaceX comes to mind) but generally speaking what matters is the work you personally get to do, the environment you do it in and who you do it with.

Bingo. It’s important to practice appreciating the meaningfulness of the mundane. That’s where most of the real action of life is. There are also plenty of interesting ways to make improvements here.

And we can still keep some time for daydreaming and chasing the next paradigm shift.

> Carnivals sure seem fun!

I like that most ride owners (at least in UK) FUCKING. HATE. CHILDREN. It must be purely about the cash.

I'm currently about to leave a job that fits this kind of description. The way it was presented to me ended up not fitting what it actually is like on a daily basis.

Just need to figure out the right questions that can expose the core of the role and see if it's really what you want or if red flags will come up.

One thing I'd recommend is trying, to the extent you're able, to broaden which layers or dimensions you look to in determining whether something is interesting.

Obviously, there will be some products that viscerally excite you and others that don't, but let me elaborate: perhaps a company is working on a tool to help construction workers orchestrate cleanups at their work sites...or the company is working on a platform to help automate property management...whatever.

These may not seem as exciting, on the surface, as other products you may have seen out there, but it could be that digging into them further there are elements which will pique your interest. For example, perhaps the systems that need to be built in support of these products are particularly complex or they present particular scaling challenges, etc.

The underlying product may not be super interesting to you, but it could be that the engineering work involved in them is actually more interesting than some other product that feels more exciting to you. Or perhaps the business or operations side of these companies is very interesting and well-executed and there are things to learn on that front.

I'm not expressing this very well, but my main point is that there can be a divergence between products that are interesting and work that is interesting - often times the less exciting product presents more interesting/challenging work. To see that, you need to take into account the entire equation: the biggest challenges the company is facing, the long-term strategy, how sharp the business/ops side of the company is, etc.

Keep an open mind; things that, at first glance, don't seem interesting may turn out to involve _very_ interesting/rewarding work.

Great point. This is probably an excellent thing for you to look for as you are interviewing with companies (and yes, you are also interviewing them). Ask your future peers and colleagues what they find fascinating about their work, and how they find meaning in what they do. You may be surprised by what you learn.

I ran into this with a web app to automate unenployment insurance claim processing.

It sounds so boring but it turns out that every state has their own process (that they change without notifying you) and they use different pieces of data to identify workers and companies. Also everything was still paper-based so we got a scanned image and OCR text.

This was 10 years ago and we were doing fairly large scale NLP in PHP, matching millions of documents to claimants and companies and doing some amount of fraud detection.

It's still among the most interesting projects I've worked on.

Awesome example: most work can be interesting, when getting into the nuances.

However, all works and companies do not incentivize doing whatever work interestingly.

A few questions I use for potential employers:

- What's one idea that you came up with and implemented, in order to make your company better? What was that process like? (Read: find out how much the company supports bottom-up innovation)

- What's the process for getting adopting a new dev tool or standing up a new server at your company? (Read: differentiate between command/approval-driven companies and need/self-serve companies)

- All the basic boring stuff: What's your CVS system? Is code visible across the organization? What's your knowledge system? Are documents searchable and visible across the organization? What's your CICD system? (Read: make sure you aren't walking into a dumpster fire where basic hygeniene has been neglected)

That work wouldn't be related to SIDES would it? If so hats off to you and yours for making such a resilient piece of software. I've been working with my states unemployment offices since the pandemic and just the interoffice differences have been causing issues with automation. I don't even want to think about making something work across state lines.

This was right before/overlapping with the beginning of UI SIDES (now there's a term I haven't thought of in a while)!

For some forms the system actually put all the information from various sources on a digital recreation of the paper form we received and faxed it off. We only did that for the most common forms though.

I learned so much about database schemas and performance, since as I'm sure you've seen you often receive claims just before (or sometimes after) the response was due and if they're a minute late the claim gets paid by default and if the claim is due at 4:30 the HR person will casually log in at 4:28 to upload several documents and fill out a lengthy form.

That's a write up I would like to read.

you just described why I started to apply to different companies back in September. Not thinking about the product but about the underlying technology.

I couldn't agree more with this. I'm currently working in a company that builds what could be considered a "boring" product. It's enterprise and thought for big companies. It doesn't have AI, blockchain or anything trendy. However, I love the work we are doing. Instead of using a lot of open-source tools, we develop our own. Even though I'm against this, it allowed me to learn a lot and got me some great experiences and learnings.

One piece of advice I can give is to try asking during interviews what are the most interesting projects the interviewers did and why. It will give you a rough idea about what they are doing and if you would enjoy working there.

Also, I don't think there is any correlation between career progression and interesting projects. You can grow working on interesting or boring projects. The important thing is what you learned and what you achieved.

One of the ways I try to think about is asking myself if I feel like my job is bullshit.

I currently work for an extremely large multi-national company on a really mundane sounding use case with a pretty vanilla Data stack. What we build has direct impact to our customers. That means that we can map what we are building to our customer experience, which means we need to understand the impact of what we make and use that to balance the various Engineering tradeoffs. I don't feel like I'm doing bullshit work.

I had another job cool sounding job with all sorts of buzzwords, including "AI." When I told people the use cases we were looking at and who I reported to, everybody thought I was doing some amazing stuff. Literally 90% of my work was chasing down BS ideas from VPs who seemed to want to find more complex ways of justifying their decisions. That job was the coolest sounding job I had and was 100% bullshit because nothing I was doing had any real impact on anything.

Bullshit work is not interesting, no matter how cool sounding it is.

Don’t underestimate what doubling your salary can do for you. Unless you already have all the financial resources you will ever need, earning that extra money, especially while you are younger can change the course of how quickly you reach financial independence. Once your financial house is strong, you can make decisions for the rest of your life that optimize for things other than money.

I chose to optimize for higher salary. I plan to get back into the nonprofit and social good world later in my career.

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes on the matter, "Whoever said that money doesn't bring happiness has clearly never tried being poor."

There's a corollary from some founder (one of the Instagram guys?):

There's really only 3 kinds of money.

There's "I don't have to worry if I'll make rent or be able to buy groceries this month" money.

There's "I don't have to think about prices or when I go out to dinner" money.

And then there's "I can take unpaid time off whenever I feel like it, and travel to where I feel like" money.

Past that, everything is just bigger numbers.

It always resonated with me, because (a) it phrased money (which doesn't really matter directly) in terms of outcomes (which do matter directly), (b) it coalesced things down into a few, very different outcome buckets, & (c) it made the observation that in terms of life outcomes, there's definitely a ceiling: unless you're looking for ways to blow money, there's a cap on how much you can reasonably spend.

Bill Gates' description of that ceiling: "I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger."

Maybe hamburgers are not the thing you should be spending your money on.

There are all kinds of projects that are potentially useful but not necessarily profitable. Having more millions of dollars means you could do more of them.

This is essentially what very wealthy people do with their money. They purchase changes in the world around them and so shape the world to more closely fit their own ideals.

I see it a lot like obesity. Too little is very bad. Too much is also bad. But there's nothing to flag when you have too much.

You see people here complaining that they can't go from $500k to $600k and everyone says that they're being greedy. But the dissatisfaction is a lot stronger at that range, and it only goes up when people become millionaires.

I think it's quite important to check that you're eating because you're hungry and not out of habit/greed/pride.

Seems to me that this is an effect of selection. Why are people not satisfied with having million dollars? Because the personality type who could become satisfied with having million dollars, would probably also be satisfied with having half million dollars, so they are unlikely to ever have the million dollars in the first place.

People who want "exactly one million, not less, not more" are less frequent in population than people for whom no amount of money is ever enough.

> Once your financial house is strong, you can make decisions for the rest of your life that optimize for things other than money.

Even if you are not a long-term thinker, just doubling your pay for a year is almost like being able to skip work for 9 months after.

High paying jobs come with other externalities (managers who are beyond caring for anything other than their cars's model years, deadlines which are about some VP's travel schedule etc), which suck while it is happening, but having the ability to just step away from it for a 3-6 month period afterwards makes you feel less trapped in that.

The pain is real, but feeling less trapped can alleviate the suffering.

That's not to say that you should rush into a burnout factory, but getting paid more has immediate consequences to your time-value at a young age - I took a sabbatical at 28 years old, which was triggered by personal issues, but the fact that I could stop work & not worry about rent for 3 months was a big factor in actually doing it.

Is this a common pattern, work a big tech job for a year or two, take a big break, rinse and repeat?

I'm about to take a big break to recover from burnout, and while I don't expect to have trouble getting back into the market next year, I'm not sure it's something I could do repeatedly without my resume looking suspicious.

I took three months off between jobs recently which is the longest I've done since graduation. It's expensive but worth it.

I am currently on a (hopefully) three-month "vacation" between jobs, and the only thing I regret is that it cannot go on forever.

I mean, you need to consider that you have 3 options, not 2: 1 is appealing products, 2 is better comp for more of the same but 3 is keeping status quo. From a purely pragmatic position, you should take the highest paying offer, because if they're similar to your current role, you're currently getting ripped off.

As for product fit: AI, blockchain, security are... very different subfields. There's a subtle but important difference between being interested in something vs being interested in the idea of something. Do you know pandas? Do you have experience running a cryptocurrency node? Do you know what are elliptic curves? Being interested in a product means gravitating towards being hands on in them without being prompted. If you're not getting success w/ job applications because you're expecting to get your foot in the door first and expect to be coached on the job, that might not be a viable career path for you in the first place. People who are actually interested in ML study it on their own time. This goes for people in the industry too, not just college kids - I know a number of people w/ a decade+ dev experience taking ML courses and reading up on the literature, and that's only for ML... blockchains have their own literature and so does security, and there's not necessarily a whole lot of overlap.

A classical example of being interested in the idea of something is getting into AAA game development and then proceeding to burn out a couple of years later because of the realization that modern AAA game development generally means working on minutiae like a cog in a machine, rather than being involved in a end-to-end creation process. Another variation is thinking you could "pivot", from, say, frontend development in coinbase to more "interesting" work on actual crypto, but due to the gap in relevant experience and lack of go-get-it attitude, that never happens.

My advice would be: take the pay increase if the alternative is nothing, and figure out exactly what subfield you want to pivot into and proactively put some work to become desirable in that field.

I personally spent 10 years working for banks, which I’m sure few of us are passionate about, but I did grow to appreciate things like the scale, the business criticality, and the opportunity to engineer properly in that environment.

Sure, working for a Crypto exchange might be more fun and look cooler, but if they have 10 customers and you are constantly under pressure to hack stuff into production for an egomaniac CEO, it is not a great environment to grow and work in.

So personally I wouldn’t be so quick to write off the boring or unsexy opportunities. Especially early in your career when you need to learn how to do things properly.

My advice is as others say: Don’t underestimate a great salary (especially when a young family I am just happy now that my car had a huge bill for the repair - nahh just fine I can pay:)). Look for a great manager and lots of learnings, even on boring topics.

I was before in a AI startup for health with AI in the company name. In fact there was no AI… just a simp’e rule base model with a few parameters on a feature not a single customer used. But hey we added AI in every marketing material and job description. So be very careful and ask the right questions. It can however help to land the next job as everyone thought I work for an interesting startup doing AI, so the bullshit goes on.

Rules-based systems are AI. They just aren't ML.

If you were to get hit by a bus after a few years, which path would give you more satisfaction having spent the last few years of your life pursuing?

I know that is a dark way to look at things, but it is also quite pragmatic. People spend so much of their careers building up wealth, skills, and power, hoping for a future day when it all will give them everything they wanted. But often you can build the life you want earlier in life by looking at your options holistically, trying to balance satisfying and meaningful work that you could be proud of in the short term... while also making enough money and building skills to carry you forward if you are lucky enough to get a long-term.

I have always tried to strike that balance - I don't work for below market rate just to get meaningful work, but neither do I seek out the highest paycheck. I look for work that adds some value to the world.

"At either end of the social spectrum, there lies a leisure class.”

—Yosemite golden-age climber Eric Jay Beck

There are many ways to happiness, sometimes you can just go for it directly, sometimes you build some security on your way there.

"Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance -- which his growth requires -- who has so often to use his knowledge?"

https://www.owleyes.org/text/walden/read/economy#root-14

>If you were to get hit by a bus after a few years, which path would give you more satisfaction having spent the last few years of your life pursuing?

One of the reasons I have a aversion to this question is that it's usually followed by "follow your passion" or something equally trite.

However, I do think it's useful when you are in a situation you hate and you wonder if it's worth leaving. Yes, definitely leave that.

If you have an "okay" job that lets you maximize your mental health and time for other things (e.g. family), maybe you'll feel like you made the right career tradeoff when that bus hits you.

Especially the family part. That is the source of great personal growth, development of virtues (as we learn from each other and serve, and seek one another's comfort and well-being), and of long-term happiness and support in life.

It is not pleasant for me to imagine life w/o my family. We are certainly not perfect, but we try to be a benefit to each other, and we are. Our parents (who are now great-grandparents) have set examples of long-term unselfishness, which helps. Others can do that to start such trends and traditions of their own. So worthwhile.

I agree much. Having a purpose in life can guide decisions. I believe life extends far beyond mortality, and what we become (virtues acquired, like honesty & kindness, learning) and our service to others are important. Edit: and earning an honest living to serve others and support a family is also honorable and good.

There were some other HN discussions where I commented in more detail, and the containing discussions also have interesting comments. (And maybe I'm a cataloguing personality, and like these ideas...):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129921

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23452651

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28867645

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553508 (this one has a bunch of HN links to discussions on internal motivation)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708786

Take the best offer from the least demanding company.

Use 1-2 years there to upskill in area you care about. Effectively work minimum needed to get a good review from them. Then apply again to area you want to work in, with new salary as your standard.

Will take patience and perseverance.

My theory is that jobs that pay me well have interesting problems to solve because otherwise they'd pick a cheaper engineer. So I don't worry about how the job sounds and just assume that if it pays a lot better, it will probably come with interesting challenges. So far I haven't been wrong, but maybe I'm just lucky.

This is correct.

The tech megacorps are kind of an exception to this. They've got enough money to pay double what you'd get at another company and then put you on whatever dreadful project they couldn't get anyone else to work on. That's an "interesting challenge" I suppose but not the kind most people mean.

are you at a FAANG-tier company? I'm not and never have been, but would say I'm quite well-paid, and this is absolutely not my experience. They pay a lot because it's work nobody wants to do.

Eh, a better model I've found in the general case is negotiating strength. In that model the people who were perceived to not be able to get a better salary also get shit work to do.

The problem is that it's hard to define what's meant by interesting. It could be that companies who pay well have to because most people don't find their problems interesting so they need to pay more just to get people in the door, but there can be interesting aspects to almost any job and if you're the kind of person that focuses on finding the interesting in the otherwise boring then you'll tend to find the job interesting and feel like you lucked out in some way.

> because most people don't find their problems interesting so they need to pay more just to get people in the door,

That's true when we're talking about a difference between 8$/h and 20$/h. If we're talking 50$/h vs 100$/h, or 100$/h vs 200$/h, I'm willing to take the bet that higher-paying job is going to be challenging enough. But indeed, it's also up to the person - in one job you may fix code, in another you may set up processes for entire teams, and if you just want to be left alone to code stuff that you like, what I said is absolutely not true (the opposite is - at some point you start to have to code less). Some other commenter nailed it - higher paid jobs tend to be more impactful. Whether "interesting" or not, that's subjective.

I don't think it's true that high paid jobs tend to be interesting, but they do tend to be impactful. A lot of big tech jobs are about cleaning up infrastructure technical debt, in many cases the work is pretty boring, but between the number of engineers at these companies and the scale of their products, even very small improvements can be force multiplied. However, even though there is a lot of downstream impact, it won't be super visible to you. It's the classic "if an engineer can save 15 minutes of every Google engineer's time every day, that's worth billions to the company."

But to more broadly agree with your point, I do think if one job pays you a lot more than the other, on average that's because they value you more, and they will be a lot less likely to waste your time. If you work for 50k a year, your CEO will be happy to have you work on all sorts of stupid things because you're cheap so why not. If they pay you 500k a year, they're going to want to make sure that whatever you work on is actually important to the business because now when the accountants add up costs you are going to be more significant. Furthermore, psychologically it's hard not for a boss to value someone making 500k more than one making 50k a year.

I'm sure there are many, many exceptions where people are paid poorly and working on super interesting or important things (medical research being a common example), or paid well to work on meaningless stuff, but as a rule of thumb, I do think higher paying jobs tend to be better jobs independently of the bigger paycheck.

I don't think that having a "career" always means hopping jobs every 2 years in favor of a "more interesting" one. My personal experience is a bit different.

The most important thing about a new job in my opinion is not the technology you work with or the company you work for, but the PEOPLE, you work with / for...

Are they experienced? Motivated? Professional? How nerdy are they? How arrogant? Does the team work together or is it a toxic relationship? Are things like Coding Dojos, Pair Programming, Code Reviews, etc. well established? Is your potential boss fine with this or not?

The problem often is getting to know the team before you actually starting the job. I always ask for a "training day" to see, how the team is working on daily tasks...

Choosing the right "Team" and building trust over YEARS and having a work-life-balance is the most important step to build deep knowledge and still have fun, regardless in what technology. Much more important for "happiness" than money or hype hunting. If you are passionate for what you do, you will build confidence and learn much more than on the other path.

Just my 2 cents.

All things equal, pick the areas with growth. Google, Meta, Amazon all have natural monopolies in growing markets where your individual performance doesn't matter that much. This is a safe play w good short term upside. AI, blockchain, security, etc are growing areas but you need to make an initial investment and maybe a lateral or down move to retool yourself and reorient your work network. This is the risky play with a lot more potential upside.

Life is short though, once your base needs are met, figure out what you want to work on and spend more time on whatever that is.

I've been in this situation a few times and looking back at my career, I could argue I made the "wrong" choices, but they were definitely the "right" choices for me at the time. The way I think about it these days:

1. The space and how exciting it is (AI, Blockchain, etc)

2. My personal growth (learning, but also compensation & rate of career progression)

3. The people (especially who is my direct manager)

Ideally, you can get all three in a job! However, when I can't, then every single time, #3 has contributed more towards my job satisfaction than #1 and #2. However, over-indexing on #3 alone is also sub-optimal.

Even "boring" spaces often have hard problems and if you dig into the problems, then the work can become intellectually interesting. It may not be sexy or shiny, but you need to decide how much you want to index on that. If you are getting intellectual fulfillment in your day-to-day, better personal growth (including compensation growth), and work with & for good people, then that's a pretty good deal. Don't undervalue doubling your salary. It can provide optionality down the road to work on other things, like folks have said below.

Early in my career I worked on what is seemingly boring stuff but the internal engineering problems were surprisingly complex and therefore interesting, even though my "resume bullet" for that stint may appear boring to a reader. Also, the people I worked with were just the nicest and I couldn't imagine leaving that team.

I still look back on that period as the happiest time of my professional life, even though I now make many times the compensation and work on some really externally "sexy" stuff. Nostalgia might be playing into that, but I do remember being pretty happy on a day-to-day basis.

The counterpoint is that I did eventually leave that team and that company because my career was not moving fast enough and I would not have hit the financial goals I had for my family's wellbeing.

In general, sexy problems pay less.

I spent a decade doing sexy problems in science, got paid squat.

Now I'm in tech making 4-5x what I was doing, while using the skills I gained from there in a less sexy but much more lucrative pursuit. My team is great, so I am lucky in that regard.

Make hay while you can. The fact you have these choices is great, but career progression is what you make of it.

IMHO I would say you get paid highly precisely because you spent a decade pursuing your passions and developed skills.

I paid a very high price in opportunity costs, and additional degrees. If you want to peek my cohort, I am behind by about 5-7y if you were to look at salary min/maxing.

You are right in that the skills I have gave me some opportunity, but I think I could have done without the last 3y of academia trying to make it work :).

Everything makes sense in the end. Whats actually important is the stuff between your ears and the health of you and your dearest ones. Money and age are just two numbers that dont mean too much.

Totally! To be fair, I would not trade it for anything. I saw things no person had ever seen in the world. It's tough when you're in there though, the feelings of no escape really get to you.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine online last week. We got onto the subject of what I do for work. I told him I'm a software developer for a customer relationship management platform that's focused on real estate. He said "wow, not gonna lie, that sounds booooooring! I'd hate doing that."

Funnily enough, my current job has been one of my favorites. There are always creative and interesting problems to solve. The feedback from my team and from the customers is also rewarding.

I certainly have some itches that I need to scratch in terms of personal projects, but generally, I'm satisfied with just how involved and exciting my "boring" job is.

Don't get discouraged if you're not seeing what you want right away. Consider cutting your teeth with some not-so-appealing companies. It may turn out that it's not so boring to you. And also, you'll get some additional experience for when those jobs turn up later.

there was a great quote in the Jay and Silent Bob movie, where Ben Afleck says something like (paraphrasing):

"You do one for the money, one for the art, one for the money, one for the art, and one because you owe your friend a favor."

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneForTheMoneyOn...

your career is long :) do both!

Lots of different things to consider but would also factor in opportunity to learn: if you take that offer which doubles your salary, do you have opportunities for growth, either in leadership or from a technical stand point?

At one point, I personally took a short-term pay cut in order to join AWS, an organization I once really wanted to work with. Ultimately, the decision paid off, both financially and career wise; hard to put a price on working with great people, building great products, and stretching oneself.

Don't get me wrong, money is important and making that leap of 2x might be the right move for you, right now. That choice will also be advantageous when it comes to future negotiations. But if you are early on in your career, you might want to find a position that allows you to master your craft.

Commit to building up significant reserves, then pursue passion. Your compensation rate increases will likely ceiling out at some point, that's when you should consider jumping back out. If you can stand it that long, try to enjoy the ride too so it's not all about the money.

When I was in my late teens, I realized that videogame development was harder, underpaid and didn't focus on the aspects I liked about software development (long term vision of the software, software design).

I dropped that and never looked back. My career is very happy, enjoyable, well paid.

As usual there are exceptions in every context, but what you seem to be doing is similar, I believe that focusing on the product is wrong.

Working on a type of product has little connection to the type of work that is going to be performed, which could be boring or very different from what expected.

My thought has always been: focus on the type of work you want to do, the rest comes naturally (potentially even passion for a new product!)

there's a lot of bullshit in AI, and blockchain is almost 100% bullshit. Much of the engineer-porn industry is just marketing hype, so if you set out to get a job based on marketing hype I'm afraid you might be disappointed.

You could try to find a product that interests you intrinsically rather than based on marketing? If you have passions, it's rarely a bad idea to pursue them unless the industry exploits said passion (ie, games industry). Failing that, money's always nice.

Just to try to offer you balanced perspectives, I'm someone who had the opportunity to join a team where I thought the work would've been less appealing but the jump in career path and finances was noticeable. I didn't because I do enjoy my current team and the balance that my work provides, in addition to it being sufficiently stimulating still but not taking me so out of my depth that it causes dread.

I regret not leaving. Nothing has changed at my current job, but I think there is something to be said for the possibility of finding yourself at a local instead of a global maximum. I would hinge a lot of this on your age, but especially if you are on the younger side, I think we undersell the value of leveling yourself up professionally so that perhaps at the NEXT opportunity you will have even more choices. I would factor into the companies that maybe you are not so keen on working on, if whether or not getting exposure to that work, the salary, title, etc. would cause you to in a short while be better position to explore and even wider and potentially more exciting set of opportunities. I think it is to not think about that effect.

I have been on both sides of this.

I worked for a time at a startup with decent salary in a generalist role, such that sometimes I did things directly related to my skillsets and interests, and other times got to pick up entirely new skillsets. This broadened my horizons significantly and put me in a decent position financially, though nowhere near FIRE.

After that I took a pay cut to pursue something fun and interesting (moving to a new country to help an old colleague establish a research group). This gave me a chance to work on my own projects and passions but also pulled me out of the fast-paced and wide-reaching environment that you find in a startup. The freedom is great but the cash compensation hurts a bit, so the rest of the package has to make up for it -- most days it does.

All things considered, you can find interesting things to do (and people to do them with) in most positions. Taking one with higher compensation and comparable commitment of time and energy is rarely a mistake. Especially if that compensation makes you financially independent with reasonable probability.

>I have offers which look positive from a financial and career progression point of view, but in boring products which not interest me at all and which have no upside at all.

>Have you ever been in that position? What did you do?

Yes, I chose the "boring" job that with fabulous compensation. (It was proprietary accounting systems and it paid better than FAANG.) I spent 10+ years at it and made a lot of money but it's also one of my biggest regrets. Consider 2 groups:

- (group A) prioritize money more than the particular job. They can compartmentalize the boring job and do the fun stuff on the weekend.

- (group B) people prioritize interesting work more than the money. As long as the job offers a decent salary, that's good enough.

I thought I was in group A but it turns out I was actually in group B.

However... the big caveat with my anecdote... The problem with answering your question is that the right choice depends on _your_ personality.

I'd be wary of taking your conclusions at face value. You can obviously reason differently after accumulating a lot of wealth over the 10+ years.

What-ifs are an impossible dilemma, and I wouldn't stress on what type of person I am: I know I change, so I am a different person at different points in time (and in large part, due to circumstances).

It sounds like you could comfortably take a couple years off to do whatever you regretted not doing earlier, and by the end of it, you should have no regrets. If you do, however, plan your days like it's work (I've taken multi-year leave, and I behaved as if I have all the time in the world, and I didn't really achieve much of what I wanted to ;-).

This is easy. Go with the one that offers a team that you like and a technology platform that you enjoy working with.

The product doesn't matter. You will find interesting challenges in any problem domain. But your coworkers and management will make the difference between looking forward to each day and dreading each day.

I switched jobs recently after 7 years at a company. It wasn’t the best job in the world, and I could’ve been making more money elsewhere, but I was finding the work interesting. I had one offer that was a substantial pay increase, but ultimately decided I wouldn’t be happy - it just wasn’t interesting work, and I was fortunate to be in a position where I had a choice.

It took more than a year, and quite a bit of rejection before I found a company I liked, with the benefit of more money.

I’m very happy I made the move. It took a long time and a lot of faith that I would find something better.

There are some programmers that love to program, and as long as they get to do that, they’re happy. Some are happy to do whatever so long as they’re making boatloads of cash and time to spend it. For me it’s engaging work in a space I’m interested in

I have been in a similar position multiple times.

And I regret the times where I let money decide. It usually felt like "Ok, I'll just do this for a few years, make a boatload of money and then move on".

In retrospect it feels like I wasted those years. Life is so much bigger than a bank account. Time is priceless.

>Time is priceless.

I wholeheartedly agree, but working at a company is selling time no matter how interesting the technology might be. It's not the same as working on personal projects; there will always be unpleasant aspects to it, certainly after more time passes (I've been through more M&A than I care to think about).

If the goal is to stop selling your time, then double the salary would achieve that goal twice as fast, assuming the job is at least tolerable. Never work for a shit hole where you dread coming in, but money is a means to an end. Money is freedom.

None of my jobs after college have been actually "making the product." All of them have been "making things which enable the product to be made."

Maybe it's just the things I like to do don't lend themselves to actual products but instead are the shoulders which others often need to stand on to actually make products. But I don't think I've ever worked in a company where the main product was something I am passionate about, but all my jobs have been jobs I've been passionate about (at least at the beginning of each job).

If the job offers you're getting are to do interesting things to help make boring products, take it! Learn and do the interesting parts that you like.

Where you are in your career also matters. For my last job, I took a pay cut to work at an interesting startup, and of course went into it knowing it might not last.

I'm more interested in stability now. On my last job hunt i was avoiding some more interesting work in favor of stability. I was in my late 30s at the time and just didnt want to go through all the start up problems I've experienced in the past.

That all said, I'm on a small team now working on an ecommerce site. It seems like a boring job, but I've been surprised at how much I've been able to use "interesting" tech to solve problems. You actually dont know when that boring job might be exactly what you want.

What are your long term objectives? What are your short term ones? Have you tried career counseling or coaching?

It`s all about where you want to go. Then when you reach there, you can move to jobs where you can do the same but for more money or for more interesting conditions.

For example: a friend of mine wanted to be an engineering manager. She worked for 10 years with this objective in mind. At year 8 she become one, but in a sucky place. Now at year 10 she is still an engineering manager but in a place that pays more. Her next objective is to find an engineering manager position with both good pay and interesting work.

Experience matters.

If you want to increase your ability to get the jobs you want, working at a well-known firm for a few years is the most straightforward way to boost your resume. People with a few years of Google or Microsoft on their resume often move to the front of the line for hiring.

Take one of the well-paying jobs. Do well, leave a good impression, and network well among the people you meet. Re-evaluate in a few years. Who knows, you may discover you like these companies a lot more than you think. If not, your resume will be well-prepped for the next move.

That's not really much of a position. You got offers from some that solve one problem, and didn't from others that solve a different problem. I'm basically here as well, and I know that software development can be soul-destroying, so you need to get what you can out of it and try to find a place that satisfies both areas if you can. More money, past a certain point, doesn't necessarily bring more life value unless you're a consoomer. But you do want to probably be around that point anyway

If you progress your career then you'll have more involvement and will be able to have more impact when you eventually move to a company where the product really interests you.

Instead of focusing on a "cool" product, try to focus on companies/products which are solving meaningful or interesting problems (subjective to what you find meaningful and interesting of course) and then apply there. In my experience that is the best route of being happy and productive there.

Career progression is great, but there is an upper ceiling as long you want to still code. Only renumeration can still go up on some point.

Nobody spends much time on their deathbed talking about how much money they made. Though, while money maybe can't buy happiness, having too little of it isn't great either.

I guess I'd try and project out lines for what happiness and financial security look like for both choices, over a couple of decades. Keeping in mind that you can jump onto the other line now, or 5/10/20/etc years from now.

It's hard to answer as it's very personal and there are other elements to take into account.

My first advice would be that if you can double your salary, do it. We don't know what tomorrow will be made of.

Also you don't mention work-life balance and quality of relationships with colleagues which to me is more important than interest in the product.

That being said, you can also keep interviewing and try to find a job which checks all the boxes.

Pick the position that will equip you with the experience you need (or have growth opportunities for that experience) to get the gigs you want. This means optimize both for the work itself and also the team/people you'll be working with.

The money will follow. Maybe not in the same quantity, but money has a diminishing ROI after a certain point versus working on things you want to work with.

At this stage, you technically don’t have the option to work in the field you want. So the only question that you have to answer is: “what do I answer to the person who is offering me to double my salary?”.

Personally I find it fairly obvious. And while you take that new job and money, nothing prevents you from training in one of those fields that interest you more…

You can have both. I know folk who work in healthcare doing SW as they are passionate about health things. You can have it all if you step away from companies that are SW or IT type shops first and look for companies whose core business appeals to you. E.g. a white water rafting company needs SW people too.

If you end up with the higher paying job, one thing you could consider is donating a portion of that money to effective organizations that support initiatives that interest you. So your more boring job can still contribute to important work happening in the world.

There is a spectrum and thresholds we all have but in general: Work for money and find meaning in hobbies/side projects/etc. This doesn't mean money above all else, just that looking for both is unlikely to bear fruit.

Take the better paying job and find your meaning by volunteering.

There are countless nonprofits that need your help solving tech problems and you can face some compelling real-world challenges that need very clever solutions to overcome.

You take the good-paying job and find meaning through family life, hobbies, etc...

1. Why are you looking (assuming you are still employed)? 2. Why did you get no offers in your 'dream' companies? If you answer those two questions honestly, you will have your answer to this question.

"Career progression vs. meaningful/appealing products?"

Either sounds good. I have neither.

I'd go with money. Get enough of it and you can focus on the products you want to work on, including personal ones.

I have two kids so I chose the career and money over the fun product. I left my fun job for double the salary, it was a no brainer. I'll get another fun job in a few years.

'AI, blockchain, security' to me this doesn't sound like a 'futurist', it sounds like someone who is easily convinced by buzzwords and marketing :)

if you select domains which don't align so closely with the buzzwords of the day and accept a more modest paycheck you may find more success in your search for a dream job (personal anecdote, not a prescription)

there are a lot of people looking for jobs right now with keywords AI, blockchain, cybersecurity

meanwhile many disciplines struggle to find decent candidates due to lack of interest

> if you select domains which don't align so closely with the buzzwords of the day and accept a more modest paycheck you may find more success in your search for a dream job

Personally I’ve found the opposite, a lot of the domains I’m interested in are interested in people who are… not me. Conversely I’m mildly confident with a little bit of investment I could get some blockchain startup to hire me.

in Transformers 3, there is a good example about this.

Sam wanted a job that matters, so he rejects the offer. Then the conversation follows along the lines of: "you want the job after this job, but this is the job standing in the way".

In this context, I understand by that: focus on career progression, and then switch to "save the world".

most of the engineering complexity occurs beyond the obvious product surface. moreover , most scenarios and use cases exist outside of a typical consumer experience . if you limit yourself to certain products that you are familiar with, you will eliminate 80+ % of the engineering opportunities out there

I am trying to think what advice I would give you if you were my friend versus an internet anon (because I am going to assume the advice I give to my friends is the best advice). If I were talking to one of my close friends: I would never, under any circumstance, advise them to take a job they are not completely enthusiastic about across multiple dimensions.

The advice I give to my personal friends is that they should never accept a role that is not 50 - 100% better (or more) across multiple dimensions including pay, skills, product, team, life / work balance, manager. I tell my personal friends that they shouldn't take any job which is not "transformational" to them in some way.

I tell my friends: If you are not jumping out of your seat for this opportunity, don't do it.

This market is crazy, exploding, lots of innovation and hiring. And if you are not finding something interesting in this market: The problem is either your search strategy, your profile / behavior or your network / relationships.

If I were you, I would focus on evolving my search strategy to get away from knocking on the front door and work on relationship building. And if there is something materially wrong with your skill / experience / qualification profile versus some of these jobs: Be completely realistic about what you are missing and go fix it.

When I wanted to become a tech evangelist, I couldn't get jobs because I only had 4 / 10 of what those roles needed. So I spent 6 months systematically closing the gaps in my story and the next job, I got it right away. Be incredibly realistic: Do you have 100% of the check boxes needed for the jobs you want? IF not, go and fix it. This is one area where being able to take an honest, hard look at yourself versus what is wanted is going to pay off.

Get on LinkedIn and Twitter, talk directly to decision makers (or "friendlies" who will talk to you at the target company list). Do more information gathering before trying to apply.

Be prepared to tell people: "Hey, if you see anything like X,Y,Z - Let me know. I am looking for jobs like that." Sometimes it takes weeks or months, but people remember and will send you opportunities. The more seeds like that you plant, the better you will do in six months.

The internet makes people feel like they just need to click to apply. It often doesn't work that way.

Finally: I have found that certain industries have "Super Networkers" who kind of help everyone and are known by everyone and are connected to everyone. I strongly recommend trying to find and make friends with these super networkers / community organizers because they are often the most accessible gateways to breaking into an industry.

Go make friends with these people, let them know what you are looking for and ask them to refer anything they see. This is way more effective to get really good leads in my experience.

nice one

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