Money vs. Passion – What would you do?

I was reading the first line about the startup and thinking "Oh cool, that's the passion option, now let's read about the money".

Given the success rate of startups, your choice is more like "passion vs passion" or "work vs education". You might be overestimating the potential equity, or the probability of getting any large payout from the startup.

Depends on how old you are and how much money you already have. If you have enouhg saved up for a house and you're in your mid thirties or fourties, do what you love and enjoy that.

If you're in your twenties and don't have a lot of financial security yet, I definitely think it's beneficial to just chase money for a couple years.

Money now is worth so much more money later on, it is definitely worth the temporary sacrifice. I have friends who are multimillionaires just because they worked at good jobs and invested a lot of their money in their early twenties.

I've never worked at a FAANG or had a crazy salary but I stashed away a decent amount doing contract SWE in my early twenties and now I'm very financially stable and own a very nice house fifteen years later.

Do not count on equity and do not trust the projections they gave to you.

If you want to switch to SWE, then grind leetcode and apply to some roles. If that doesn't work out, look into bootcamps and masters programs. You should be able to find one with night classes so you can keep your current job.

Also FWIW, "just be a SWE at a cool startup" sounds incredibly naive. What makes a startup cool? Why would that fulfill you? I would reflect more on what you want out of life and stop drinking the startup life kool aid.

It's difficult to give you proper advice cause it's not clear what your coding skills are (learning is much longer commitment than doing a MSc, and being average at it sucks...).

Also it's unclear what "semi-tech" means here, and why it couldn't include coding? If they give you an important role, you can just ask that they set up a dev env on your machine and code when you want to code... If you're worried that you're going to screw the product, code on internal tools to help you do your non-tech job. It's fun too...

Like jstx said, equity is not money, so you shouldn't sweat much about not taking the offer, but my experience is that it's cool to have a foot on the business side of things, cause when you're 100% coding, you may be sidelined by strategic choices in which you won't have anything to say...

In any case, learning to code by doing it is likely better than getting a MSc. You can always go back to uni later. My view is that an MSc will teach you a lot more if you already know how to code decently well.

I'd go for money. What I've discovered during my career is that passion and work do not mix very well. You might like programming, but as your career advances you'll be doing less and less of it. At senior level, tech roles become semi-tech.

I am confused. Do you want to code or do you want to do an MSc ? You don't need MSc to code or learn to code. So make sure you are clear on what it is that you really want because the opportunity cost of a degree is very high. Almost always, a degree is of no use if want to code. You can self learn and get a job.

Why not start in this semi-tech role at the startup and show them that you want to do more slowly. Perhaps they will let you as startups as scrappy and good ones will give you the opportunity to excel. You get to buy the house and code. Win win :)

I remember reading Hugh McCleod's theory of "sex and cash". The link here describes it pretty well...

https://medium.com/a-lesson-a-day/mapr-16-2017-hugh-macleods...

You only need so much money. Past a certain point, just live! There's not a lot of luxuries better than enjoying what you're do for most of your life.

This might not be applicable advice for most other fields, but even the lower end of SWE salaries pays so well.

Also with a job you love, you could actually live like a hermit and enjoy your life.

If you go for anything only because "passion" you have a huge risk.

Passion like any feeling has tendency to come & go, and is not always under our control.

But why make it a dilemma? Just start doing whatever you want to try in parallel with your job while you have no serious obligations, and just see where it goes.

My opinion and advice. If:

1. You can sustain yourself financially for the next 2 years

2. You feel confident in your skills

3. You want to try work on your own thing for a year

Then: Do it!

You likely won't be on your deathbed wishing you'd made more money in that one year.

If you can't satisfy 1. and 2. yet, just work towards that for now.

I was just watching a video of California fires. Then heard about the latest climate change report. At this rate, money might not help much. Might as well live life and do passion things

Passion. We don’t know how much time we have. Enjoy your life.

This is a tradeoff I've grappled with a lot in the past 5-6 years. I was in my mid-twenties at the start of that period, and I generally have chosen money over passion. Part of my reasoning was that I could try and utilize some of that money to hire people to work on my areas of passion for me, and I could just oversee that work.

I think overall it's yielded mixed results. For me, part of choosing the money meant being committed to a full-time job, and that challenged me in ways I don't think I would have been able to simulate had I not chosen that path. The main value was the growth in a variety of soft skills -- leadership, ability to critique products and maintain high standards for quality, communication skills, overall discipline and professionalism. I think those areas of growth were a lot more valuable than the actual money.

I'm very proud of being able to financially support my family, and I probably take for granted the fact that we haven't really had to worry much about money for half a decade. So there are certainly upsides to choosing the money.

I do feel envious of my peers that have chosen their passion and been successful going down that path -- I feel like they've gotten to experience the best of both worlds and I wish I was in that group. But there are probably a lot of my peers who tried to choose their passion and failed, and I feel lucky that I'm not in that group. Ultimately, in my case, choosing the money was a bit of a hedge to ensure a middle-ground -- I didn't have to worry about failing but I eliminated my chance to get the best of both worlds.

If I could go back in time right now and do things over, I would probably try to find a way to instead choose passion, but do so with some form of strong mentorship in place to help support me from the start. Easier said than done to find the right mentorship structure, but I think that's what I'm hoping to transition toward for my next 5-6 years.

In terms of your situation, I'd encourage you to question whether the MSc is really necessary -- if your goal is to code or be an awesome SWE at a cool startup, the MSc is probably not a good use of your time.

I also want to strongly second the others in here giving the advice to not count on equity & not trust the projections they gave you. Any actual money you hope to get out of that might only be realized years away at best, and never realized at worst. You might still want to make that bet, but make sure you do so with a full understanding of how risky a bet it can be.

I actually work in technical interviewing and technical hiring so please feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat more about this topic. Email is in my profile. Best of luck with your decision!

man you telling me you cant pursue passion while working? come on.