Comment by hack_fraud13 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hack_fraud13 | Hacker News Reader

Depending on where you are on the midwest (e.g. if you’re in Moline working for Deere) 100k is pretty close to the 250 your friend gets in SV. I’m pretty early in my career too but I started out in a small town in the Midwest too (not originally from there) and it was very dreary. Hard to make friends and hard to date since people get married very early in those communities. Just saying I relate but I wouldn’t sweat the comp difference.

If your main goal is changing location try applying for jobs at your current company. You’ll have an edge over other applicants and your boss will probably help if you ask to connect you with people. Just my two cents. Once you’re relocated it’ll be easier to find opportunities outside your current company in your new city.

I think we’d need more details on your career goals to offer any more advice than that. If a startup is your goal, can you say what industry or niche? There’s a lot of opportunities in hardware, especially in B2B. Personally I’m jealous of you hardware guys

Yea people say don't sweat the comp difference but I'm pretty frugal, living with my parents and have a savings rate of ~75%. Thus I assume my rate would go down to 40%-60% but I'd still net more and have more $$ to invest.

Unfortunately my company doesn't have jobs in the places I want to go to. Well it does have a nice location in the Valley, and I've tried to work out there but then COVID happened; recently a team I wanted to go onto disbanded, another team got let go. I'm just not happy with the direction we're going in.

I guess I should define my career goals as well. Near term, I'd either want to work at a FAANG or a startup, but as I said before I have a wide range of interests. I could see myself working on robot architecture / integration, VR headsets and application, computer vision for flying cars. One thing I think about a lot is that if I choose one of these niches, is that hindering me from exploring the other ones a year or two after that? I've enjoyed my current role a lot in that I've been able to be a generalist and play around with a lot of different technologies, which I like. This makes it difficult to even start haha.

Long term is also difficult to say, as the tech scene is moving so quickly it's hard to visualize where I'd like to find myself. I'm also not part of any tech community or club that has a lot of visioneering people; I used to be future-focused and had a group of like-minded friends but they've all either left or COVID killed the interactions.

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