Stay at Big Tech or leave?

It's a common tale, the golden handcuffs conundrum. What I'd suggest is considering the maxim: "The long run is made up of a series of short runs." Right now, you're doing short runs that don't satisfy you. That compensation, as glorious as it is, doesn't feel so heavy in your pocket when your day-to-day lacks substance and joy.

You were probably hoping to craft cathedrals, not lay bricks. This mismatch between expectation and reality is jarring and, sadly, rather commonplace. But remember, the skills you truly love can be kept sharp outside of work hours. It's not ideal, but it's a measure to prevent skill atrophy and keep passion alive.

The good news? The tech industry is vast. There's always a corner where code is king and where a day's work leaves fingerprints on the actual product. It might pay less—sometimes much less—but the intellectual and emotional reward can compensate.

> compensation is amazing

STAY where you are. Money is freedom, accumulate until you reach escape velocity.

You can sharpen your programming sword on your own time. It's nice when job and personal interests align, but if your workplace is non-toxic and paying well, consider very carefully before letting it go.

You may be able to find ways to learn and grow on company time as well. Make your own tooling to help analyze that data, whatever.

It's never going to be like it was in college. People don't pay you lots of money for that.

I can't tell you whether to stay or leave, but you have to understand that any job you land will be a job, and someone else is going to be in charge of the what and the how.

Also, please don't spend all of your free time coding. By all means do a bunch of coding in your free time. But do lots of other stuff too.

Consider switching teams. At every big tech company there are different teams that spend more time on different tasks. Keep your compensation, change your work. Implement new features in a kernel, or new optimization passes in a compiler. Build a UI for an new feature.

But if that doesn't work, you should leave. It's is a tremendous opportunity cost to spend your early career not learning new things.

Jonathan Blow has strong opinions[1] on this.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nL8GWU9M8LY

This doesn't sound like a Big Tech problem. This is a problem of mismatch between your current role and your interests.

If your big tech company has an easy transfers policy + culture, you may be able to narrowly address the mismatch without affecting other aspects of your job such as comp. Perhaps your manager would even support you in making this move by helping you to spot your next opportunity and steering your work in that direction.

In any case, with the weak labor market in tech right now and what sounds like a rather short tenure with your current and first real job, I'd recommend you stick it out for another year+. There may be some things you can do to incorporate the design & coding work you love into your current role to keep up your motivation and skills, without having to overcome biases related to a resume gap or short stint when you interview for your next posting.

My 2c

Working at a “large tech” company can be rewarding in several ways. Less stress, more pay, huge tech stacks and access to more resources within the company.

My advice is to prioritise the work for your role, but also look for other problems in the company that you can (and want to) solve… without somebody asking you too.

If you discover that a new script can improve CI builds, or a new internal website can help people find documentation…etc… the rest of the company would be thankful for your effort, and if everyone loves it that could be your new responsibility!

Compare this to a “small tech” company, it’s generally less resources, less pay, more stress, more hours, tighter deadlines etc… which makes it harder to work outside your immediate responsibilities

Basically, it’s easier to go off and find random problems to solve with your programming skills in a large company, as they’re generally in a better position… and have more problems.

Ironically this means an individual can “feel more entrepreneurial” in a large company a lot of the time

Sadly, outside of early stage startups, most engineering jobs are a lot of boring work. Now and then, you'll have a super interesting project, but in my experience it's pretty rare. If you like the company, perhaps see if you can transfer to another team / department. I did that once and it bought some more time.

From all your responses below, it sounds like you are pretty much ready to leave. Although at first I agreed with many of the responses below that recommended you "stick it out" even longer, judging from your reaction, it appears that you want to leave and you are financially prepared with savings at the ready. In that case, sometimes, inaction is action so why not put some feelers out for possibilities? Just because you're looking doesn't mean you will quit. Evaluating your options may help you decide that what you have now isn't so bad after all or may lead to a new adventure.

It doesn't seem like it would be irresponsible to just look around for options.

My first job was paying a good amount of money and I also went to graduate school and worked hard to prepare for the job but looking back, I was lethargic and quite bored. Because it was my first job, I thought all jobs just felt that way. People would say "it's called 'work' for a reason - it's not supposed to be fun" so I accepted that because I had no other experience to compare against. Now I have the perspective to know that it was a boring job that happened to pay well but I love what I do now and it doesn't even compare in terms of fulfillment and joy.

I left bigco to a -much- smaller company, like <50 people. I recognized it as a career speed bump and slight pay cut, but it’s in the tech I like to use and I am actually writing code. Three months in I’m more than happy with my situation.

For most people the comments are correct, stay at bigco unless you’re sure. Far more stable and career-forwards.

What are your goals?

Is it more important to have a job where you encounter technical challenges and/or make a big difference, or is it more important to have a comfy job with a good salary? The latter can sometimes give more freedom in other areas. E.g. if you need that salary for buying a nice home, saving up for the kid’s college funds, funding your hobbies, supporting charities etc etc.

Also, if you haven’t already seen it I can warmly recommend this article by Julia Evans – “Some possible career goals”. It can be very useful when trying to articulate for oneself what one’s goals are.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/09/30/some-possible-career-goals/

HTH!

Only you know what's right for you. If I were in your position, though, I'd absolutely leave. There is a wide world of well-paying, very interesting, dev jobs out there that are also at great places to work.

Suffering in order to maximize income is, for me, a bad deal. You can enjoy life and make very good money even if it's not technically the most money you can possibly make.

> now I feel like my skills are degrading.

For me, speaking purely from a professional point of view, this is completely unacceptable. You need to be increasing your skills over time. If they're degrading, you're setting yourself up for a career disaster later on.

Normally i say chase engaging work, but lately i try to temper that with "non programming life is even better a lot of times".That said, do you still have time/energy in your nights to work on oet projects DESPITE the boring daily work? I find boring work drains me more than tougher problems do. If you can still work in your off hours then consider that your next position may pay less and consume more mental energy, enough that your pet projects cease or slow. Its a tough choice, for sure and leaning on inaction always feels bad doesnt it?

I completely understand where you're coming from but for a better future, try to fight through it for at least a year or two. Such is life, work is work. Not all of it is glamourous.

You are very early into your career and in a pretty great spot. Don't waste it.

Big tech experience will open a lot of opportunities for you and this includes non-career or financial opportunities.

You should still continue with your pet projects. Remember we underestimate what can be achieved in a year.

Wish you all the best!

> I really love software engineering. I'm the kind of person who spent hours in their free time coding up their pet projects.

What you described at your job _is_ software engineering. Software engineering might have a large programming component in it, or it might not.

I'm overwhelmed by all of the people taking time to help me here. I got a lot of different perspectives out of this and some really helpful next steps.

Thank you everyone! So nice :)

Put a year in for the name brand on your resume, it’ll pay dividends. Then about 2 months before that anniversary start interviewing for something you might like better and be very discerning.

Imagine you could have both money and satisfaction. You can.

Pick some smaller companies whose mission really sings to you. Start applying.

> looking at excessive amounts of data to get a clue of what's going on.

Can you automate this by writing some code?

Pay off any loans you have, and build up enough savings to get by on for a year. Then reevaluate.

Do you have an email address or a contact method?