Ask HN: Advice on changing jobs as an early-career engineer
I'm 28 yo male living at home, with a BSE/MSE in EECS/Robotics from a top University. I love tech, and like to think I'm ambitious but have gotten caught in a bit of a mental rut, and want advice on changing jobs.
I just hit 5 years working as an Research Engineer at a big company in the Midwest. I make $100k + $10k bonus which is pretty good for my area. I'm hybrid and only need to come in 2/3 times a week, though I seem to get more done in office nowadays. I enjoy my job even though there a lot of things I don't like about it. I get to be a jack of all trades in my role, working on different skill sets in Robotics, Embedded Hardware, CAD/3D Design, Simulation, Web/UI/UX, and my co-workers are all intelligent and nice people. In my first few years however, my role was not very well structured and I felt like I was not contributing much at all to the company; as well, many projects that we were working on or should have been working on were cut and there is a general lack of vision in certain areas that require it. In the last few months though, I have been put on a high-impact project and I've been feeling a lot better about my work.
Due to various circumstances, I would like to move to a different city (realistically between NYC, LA, SF, or international) and start a new job. My problem is that I have too many interests, and I'm afraid I don't know where I would like to apply to or how to market myself to multiple things at once. I feel I could be a good contributor in any role related to those above. I've worked in startups, mid-size, and big companies, and would like to start a company of my own one day, and so I'm pretty overwhelmed and pushing off even applying to jobs (which is crazy because LinkedIn makes it so easy).
I can generally be nervous around big life moves, but I'd rather not play so conservatively as I feel like it is negatively impacting my life. Coming out of college, I really wanted to work in Silicon Valley, but either didn't focus my job search well enough, or was too embarrassed by not getting to the second or third round interviews for some of the bigger name companies that I felt I might not have been good enough.
One of my friends / former coworkers left my company recently and got a job in SV making $250k total comp at an awesome company with high value, and, while I don't like to compare myself to others much (.. anymore at least), I feel that I should and could be doing similar things. Also many of my friends are making big life moves, changing careers, getting married, etc, and I simply need to be in a bigger city in order to do these things it seems.
I guess I'm just looking for advice and perhaps a change of mindset - thanks for reading.