HACKER Q&A
📣 jobHuntGuy

Need help deciding between job offers


I am trying to decide between two job offers as a new grad with little to no experience. First, I have an offer from [redacted] (Commercial side in the US) to be a security consulting analyst where I believe I could choose what I specialize in and I am pretty sure I would go with Cloud Security. Though I hear mixed things about the company, I see that quite a few employees on the security team exit to FAANG or credit card companies after a year or two which I wouldn't mind.

The second offer is to be a site reliability engineer at [redacted] where I would be working with cloud technologies such as Kubernetes/AWS, defining SLAs, SLOs, and scripting with languages like Python/GO/shell scripting. What appeals to me about this position is that it is an actual job where I don't have to worry about dealing with any random client and seems like a pretty stable gig too. Not many complaints found online for the SRE team there (I checked glassdoor and all already).

Either way, I know I want to try to move to a big tech company (Mozilla, Salesforce, Crowdstrike etc) after a couple of years working.

The compensation for both is about the same but [redacted] gives stock options.

Would appreciate any advice as this is a hard decision for me. Which one do you think gives me a better edge for my long term career?

  👤 brylie Accepted Answer ✓
What does your intuition tell you? When you think about each job, what do you feel in your body (e.g. chest, heart, abdomen)? When you think about the offers first thing in the morning, what are your initial thoughts and feelings? Take note of your intuition, it is a valuable guide.

Also, what is your option "C"? Option "C" is your wildcard or, in the words of Monty Python, "something completely different."

👤 ggm
if you really are 50/50 on choices about primary field, then move to secondary questions:

* what is the company culture? What evidence do you have about this?

* do you like the cities or towns you will have to work in? Why or Why not?

* do you have a partner, with less job mobility and perhaps can "take one for the team" to allow them to follow a dream more than the other choice?

* whats staff retention like? Not that you want to stay forever necessarily, but its good to understand turnover especially in young hires.

* what do your professors say? not that you have to agree, but might they understand your latent and overt capacities better?