Confused in life ...

I graduated in 2021 and have worked in startups across EdTech, Cloud Communication, and currently in FinTech at a Series A startup. After 1.6 years in my first role, I pursued a 23% pay increase but faced a layoff after 10 months. Now, despite my experience, I'm finding it challenging to secure interview calls for an SDE 2 position. I currently work at a Series A startup where I joined after accepting a pay cut.(little above my first company ctc😢 and working for 7 months). My Job is really writing bunch of code but not designing or implementing any prominent systems as i am still SDE-1. I'm genuinely seeking your advice: 1️⃣ How do frequent job changes early in one's career impact hiring decisions, especially in different tech sectors? 2️⃣ Given my tech skills and startup background, what strategies can I employ to strengthen my resume for an SDE 2 role? 3️⃣ How significant is the company's reputation when considering a move to a more established startups/MNCs? 4. Is it worth changing or should i continue but pay is low than previous and i am not doing any sde 2 level job. Tech Stack: Java, Python, AWS, Flask, Springboot

Need some guidance. I am currently working in a product based MNC with a decent salary for 8 months. I am having 3 years of work experience. Recently I got an interview opportunity from a US based startup company for a SDE 2 remote role with 50% hike. What shall I do? Should I be continue working in the reputed MNC or try to switch to a startup with 50% hike and complete remote opportunity? Any help and guidance is much appreciated 🙂

I have been working in this startup for around 1.5 years now, and soon I am going to be the only developer here, as the other 2 devs are going to leave soon. The company is now calling me to Bangalore. I am thinking as there will be no devs my growth will be very less, as this is my first organisation after graduation. But looking at the market situation it feels like I should just continue with the current org. I am not sure what to do. YoE; 1.5 year CTC: 9 LPA Saving: 1LPA

Been working with a pre series A level startup for about 3 years being my first job. Paid about 20-25lpa for a full stack role. Engineering + product team is still single digit strength as we are not pureplay tech company. Had a great learning because of a good manager and 0-1 kind of work we did but I am starting to feel stagnated because of following reasons 1. We don't have anything like SDE1, 2 etc because there are very few devs. 1 manager and everyone else is an SDE. The company doesn't intend to hire more for at least an year.. so i won't see any title level promotion or any role that feels senior despite being around for a while 2. Salary. Want to know if I am behind the standard pay because i belong to tier 1.5ish college. Big tech seems to pay more for 3yrs workex as usually people become sde2 by then

I have a remote job with 250k USD/2CR base salary and get to travel for free internationally 6 times a year to beautiful places in Europe. My manager is a saint and I don’t think I will ever find someone as good as him. I am considering leaving this job to startup. I would love to hear everyone’s unfiltered thoughts on this please 🙏🏼 Firstly, this is not a fake post - Luckily I have been one of the few people who were early in AI to train very large LMs, so I have an edge and get paid crazy money for it. Why am I leaving? Over the last one month I had time off from work to build a new AI capability for coding assistants. It’s a technological breakthrough and my AI is 10X cheaper and has 100% codebase coverage for automatic feature development, bug fixing and automating 3rd party integrations into your very large codebases. Others are working on it as well, but I have achieved higher results on public coding assistants benchmarks(SWE-bench). I believe in this breakthrough and technology, and this is the absolute right time to build it, not 6 months ago, not 6 months later - too early and too late. This could potentially be my next moonshot or I could also fail, but learn a lot in the process and not have regrets 5 years down the line in not pursuing a breakthrough in AI that someone down the line is going to monopolise. My financial situation is good and bad - I have NW of 3.2 Cr, but they are tied in 2 real estate properties - I am aware that this is stupid to not have anything liquid. I have a running home loan of 1Cr to the bank and 30 lakhs to be paid to my Dad, these two are my biggest mental blockers. My wife(married early this year) earns really well as well and I have some ~20L liquid, so day to day runway is of easily 1 year. Finally, I don’t believe that it I leave my current job, I will ever get another international offer that pays this well in cash and has remote work given how to market has changed recently. I am trying to disassociate from a greed mindset and looking into a potentially very high exponential growth/learnings. Please provide your suggestions frens, I am planning to speaking to my manager on Monday 🌻🌻

I see jobs being there, but even the entry level jobs are requiring experience. I saw a associate level job posting on linkedin for a startup asking for 4-6 years experience. This is in line with the recent article at The KEN. Are people really ready to work for low salary for high skills? What does this mean for the freshers, job switchers/career switchers? Are we all doomed for now? What's your take on the market?

Hey folks, I have been working in startups for my entire experience and was wondering if it would be worth it to switch to a bigger org for better growth/learning in this market? My reasons to switch 1. Low learning potential: I am a senior SDE here and WLB here is really good, too good in fact (I barely work a couple of hours if even that), this is leading to a lower learning potential, the work I get assigned, I complete in a couple of hours and while I have been given bigger projects, the learning is not there, I can easily complete them, and since I am the senior SDE here, I cant ask anyone to review my code/performance 2. Startup is in early seed stage, and there is definitely an uncertainty here about surviving till next year 3. I wasnt given much of a hike despite a level promotion (just 10%). My manager is really awesome and one of the best guys I have ever worked under and honestly I wouldnt even think of switching if I had 5-6 YOE but at this point, I think i need to learn more and get some more guidance/review from experienced folks to grow. My salary is decent, but having my friends work in FANG/FANG-equivalent is definitely not helping my FOMO, specially when I hear about their projects in their orgs and compare it to mine which are nowhere near theirs in score or complexity. and the reason why I am hesitating to switch is seeing the layoffs news coming in everyday, I can prep for interviews in the next couple of months and probably apply then but seeing all of these layoffs and folks finding it hard to land jobs is making me fear that I will lose this job with nothing to show for it in the end. So, should I switch in this market or stick it out in my current org until market situation improves (considering it wont improve until next financial year)? EDIT: posted this again because I couldn't edit the last post

Hi folks, thinking of writing a regular mini blog here about my learnings being a generalist in the ecosystem. I currently handle growth at an ecom startup and have previously been through 2-3 startups + a large corporate in my 7 year career. #1: Why you should not stay only in startups Recently started reflecting on salaries of many peers who are also startup folks and trying to see where it stands. There are 3 cohorts: a. People who started out in Big 4/Corporate & then became a generalist: They've been underpaid the most. First pay was 4-5L, and when they transitioned to startups, started at 7-9L. Over time, growing from there is difficult without MBA. b. People who have forever been in startups: They earn more than A on average. But here too, there is a delta in their salaries vs. people with same YoE who went to an MBA and are in corporate now. Side note: I've seen this cohort has usually loved what they've done, and being in startups definitely has positively impacted their thought process. c. People who went to a corporate/big tech etc. mid way: This cohort has done the best long term. Their pay got recalibrated when they went to a larger company in the middle through their career, and when they rejoined startups, they were respected more in salary negotiation. This is to anybody out there who is a generalist and sees a similar path. Try to sandwich a proper, large company in your career. It gives you perspective on whether you like it and if startups is really your preferred route. And it also recalibrates your pay. Startups will limit you basis your last salary. Corporates have standards basis bands. Just something to think over. NOTE: Do share feedback, if this makes sense. And if you'd like to read more of these too.

Hey folks, i hope you all are doing well! I have around 6 yrs of experience now including 6 months of internship in Enterprise Support role for Kubernetes product in a big Product based MNC. I have been in the same company for 5.5 years post my internship, within these 5.5 years I switched to our cloud services team like a DevOps role 2 years back. My role is a Senior Software Engineer but I am not coding much rather its mix of both Operations and Coding sometimes, because of which my development knowledge is rusty and also my DSA too. But I have been able to get things done which are necessary as a part of my daily job. Be it feature development, releases, operations and troubleshooting customer environments. So performance wise I’m doing well I believe. And I’m getting below package. So I got hikes also the package I’m getting is around (35 LPA Fixed + 5 Lacs bonus) have stocks around 10 lacs(just 2.5 lacs per year) Now the main point is even though I’m earning sone money 1] I’m not learning much from the software development perspective and I think work wise I don’t have much experience in pure development, so now I’m stuck how can I make a move to a good unicorn startup as a SDE/SRE? Please suggest any ideas to make such a move. 2] I strongly believe that I’m earning less than what I should be earning after spending 6 yrs in IT. Nowadays 3-4 So now I’m thinking of switching to a different company but again the point [1] comes in my way. 3] How much minimum amount of I should be earning as a base salary, bonus and stocks in a big product MNC or a Bangalore startup ? Looking for advices to learn and which way should I be taking to learn more and get a job where I’ll be doing proper Dev work, please advice on the way to take to do this transition. Thank you!

Worked in IT sector, product sector and now with FAANG. Total NW: 6 Crore+. A few takeaways: 1. To make money, take risks. 2. To stay happy, invest immensely in your family. 3. Money can't buy happiness, but it does buy Status and Respect in Indian society. 4. Health is still the most important thing, never neglect it. 5. Casual flirting can keep you young and motivated to look young.