Ask HN: Career advice for junior dev on first job hop?

"Currently my job is relaxed, but I am not payed well now and live in the middle of no where. I can tolerate it in the short term, but I don't want to spend another 6+ months here. I want a new job relatively soon"

"Great pay increase, hiring manager seems great, in a city I really want to move to"

Take the new job. You are still very young and you can always look for the "low level" job in another year or so. What if your interests change in a year ? You would end up regretting not taking the better job anyway.

I would say go there for the pay increase and tech atmosphere. Too many more years in your "chill" job might stall you by making you too comfortable. Also, if you want to move to that city, this is a good first step. You can keep applying to other jobs in that city once you move there. Building your network at that company could help you move to another in a couple years as those coworkers go to other companies too.

I regret not job hopping. Now I'm too old with too many family responsibilities to do it. My skills and pay have suffered as a result.

Here’s for the contrarian advice.. Given the economic climate and the little work experience under your belt, I’d think very hard before taking the risk. Moving has a cost and you have no guarantee the new exciting job will last or work-out. If that happens, your resume will have taken an unnecessary hit very early in your career.

It is very easy to undervalue what you have now. You got plenty of time ahead of you to figure what you really want to do and plan how to get there.

>Great pay increase, hiring manager seems great, in a city I really want to move to.

What's there to disklike? You can join then use this to fast-track your career: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31710673

You'll be slaying dragons if you're consistent. Experience is a function of time, intensity, and focus tied together with good communication and personality.

>I've wanted to try getting a job working in C/C++/Rust and on OS stuff or low level cloud stuff.

I don't know you personally, but that may be a fantasy of yours. You could try doing that on the side and contributing to open-source projects or doing projects of your own. You'll improve your skills and, should you still want to get a job doing that, it will put you in a better position to do so.

There aren't that many high paying low level jobs out there. Take a high paying high level job, and see if you can dig in on the low level stuff when it comes up. There's usually something low level that could be done to improve efficiency or reduce latency, etc, but other options are explored because there's no one to work on it. Dig in on profiling and debugging and you'll find opportunities where the profiling shows native code is the slow bit, and then you'll get to poke inside the JVM and the OS, and then you'll have something to highlight if you apply for future lower level jobs.

Seems to me like that most of the elements are in place - city you want to be in, work you can do, significant pay upgrade, and crucially, a positive relationship with your direct manager. If you're young in your life (as well career) the truth is you can afford a greater degree of risk - worst case scenario here is that you get bored in 6-12 months and then maybe look again; best case scenario might actually be the same thing.

I'd take the job

Thanks!

Yeah I feel like taking the job would be a good move, but since you mentioned risk I wanna ask.

Wouldn’t not taking the job be the risk taker option? The current offer I know is good and most of what I want. Or I could turn it down and continue applying (rolling the dice) on getting an even better job offer in the next month or so?

good evidence to suggest that job moves are generally very low risk if you have a set of marketable skills. If you are an engineer, this is still certainly the case - so yes, there is a risk but a recoverable one (i.e doesn't work out, leave in 3 months, find another etc). What we can say for sure though, is that there is certain risk in staying too long with an employer, at least in terms of compensation, this is the surest way to have the slowest ascent up the comp ladder

It sounds like the new job is literally everything you want and the old job is literally everything you don't want.

The fact that you're asking this question means that there's some red flags that may not be disclosed in this post it seems to me.

Take the new job. If it works out then you win, if not then you can get a tech job in under a month or maybe the old place will take you back.

The new job has everything except low level programming. I am debating rolling the dice and seeing if I get an offer with everything + doing the area of programming I want.

Oh area of programming is more important than almost everything in my opinion. That's your internal vision and goals.

But at the same timeg, I've changed what area of programming I like several times in my career as I'm exposed to new things.

Spend the first 5+ of your career getting your salary higher. Focus / specialize at that point if you like.

If they have to switch specialties at that 5 year mark, all that salary buildup may go away and they might have to start from junior-ish levels again...

To OP: I recommend switching ASAP to the field you are most interested in. It may turn out to be what you've been hoping for or it might not, but at least you'll learn something and will be able to go from there. Whereas accumulating raises doing stuff you don't care about is just wasting years of life in a holding pattern.

If you work at a bank, you'll have a hard time being taken seriously as a low level programmer. Backend at a more challenging company sounds like a good stepping stone.

What happened when you tried to get a job working in C/C++/Rust... ?

The job I got the offer from moved after than the others. Also two of the companies had hiring freezes and eliminated the position while I was interviewing.