Comment by raw_anon_1111

Out of 10 companies I’ve worked for over 30 years, I’ve only worked for two large companies - General Electric when it was still an F10 company and later Amazon (AWS) - I hated my time at each of them. In fact, I turned down an opportunity by a former coworker at AWS who was a director at another well known non tech company who was going to create a position for me to lead their migration to AWS and then their “modernization”. I turned it down even though I could have made about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash and RSUs at Amazon because I didn’t want to work at another large company after leaving Amazon.

It’s fine if you want to work at smaller “interesting” companies, I’m doing the same. But let’s not pretend there are no tradeoffs.

The intern I mentored their intern summer and the year after they got back, got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I was making at 46 in 2020 as a senior enterprise dev in Atlanta.

On the opposite side, now they are an L5 (mid level) Solution Architect at 25 working at AWS doing a similar line of work to what I do[1] and make the same total comp as I make as as a staff consultant working at mid size firm at 51.

If you want to make the eye popping big tech salaries - you have to play the game.

[1] I’m mostly post sales leading implementations and doing some management style consulting reports. My former mentor is pre-sales.