Comment by _fat_santa
3 years ago
> The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense.
You don't have to make 300k for the pay to be great. Even if you fall short of that and land at a company that only pays you $120k, you're still making a killing compared to most other professions.
> Corporate SWE is pretty awful
Then get out of Corporate. I work for an SMB, make about as much as I used to in Corporate, but the stress level and workload makes is much easier. Everyone want's one of those SWE jobs for a company that is in the news, but in fact you want the exact opposite. You want a low profile job at a company no one outside your niche has heard of. The pay is about the same, work is 10x less crazy, and if you disagree with a decision, usually you know the person that made it because the company is only about 200 employees.
> SMB
I think the signal:noise ratio isn’t great in this sector. Although corporate is 100% guaranteed misery, I have yet to come up with a reliable way to find SMBs where IT (because that’s how they call it, a SWE is the same as the help desk in their view) isn’t considered as “the geeks working the cost center in the basement”.
Do you have a method or did you rely on blind luck like the rest of us?