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Side Effects of working at startups

I am a 6 yrs experienced Software developer and part of a mid-stage startup. This is my third job; I have been working here for 3 years. I was involved here as one of the core engineers at the start in developing the overall platform, After that, my growth as an engineer stagnated for 2 years . Constant importance and priority are given to business requirements and hacky work getting pushed to production in the name of fast iterations and business impact every week. My engineering manager lacks proper engineering skills and doesn't respect engineers even after their impact on the company and constantly keeps saying the engineering team doesn't contribute to the revenue of the company despite us pushing work that improves business positively. Last year around November, around 80% of the engineering team was subtly suggested to start looking out for work (basically a soft layoff) because management was too scared of a social media backlash Due to all this,2 years' worth of technical debt has accumulated on the overall codebase and apart from giving justification for every code improvement that we try to make there, we still have to work on business/product requirements. My growth as an engineer has stopped and I am worried about missing out on the latest developments in the tech industry, especially with AI in the picture, and want to make my skillset somewhat AI-proof. I have come back to hands-on coding this year , so that's a positive start. I am considering taking a 3-4 month break after resigning from my company to study, develop side projects, develop a portfolio etc Has anyone else been in this boat ? How did you come out strong?

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Insanity check on leaving 2Cr at 26

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 🌻🌻