For example, you see a job posting at AwesomeCorp doing blockchain-based AI security arbitrators, and then you get the job and discover that you're just writing a CRUD app around a bunch of premade solutions glued together, and then you discover the "blockchain" is just an SQL server, but it got investors excited so they stuck with it.

So, sometimes a job in a less sexy field can actually end up being more interesting/challenging, and getting paid more is always nice.

The core mission of almost every company is pretty boring. I think that’s because human needs and wants (which is how companies create value: by meeting them) are old news. People need to eat, move stuff from place to place, talk to their friends, get paid. Big deal. Revolutionizing how those things are done: who cares?

History remembers real revolutionaries, not the people who made it easier to transact on the blockchain.

There are exceptions (SpaceX comes to mind) but generally speaking what matters is the work you personally get to do, the environment you do it in and who you do it with.

I like that most ride owners (at least in UK) FUCKING. HATE. CHILDREN. It must be purely about the cash.

And we can still keep some time for daydreaming and chasing the next paradigm shift.

I have seen first hand a big old company buying for millions an "automl startup" which was just a simple web interface to pycaret.

Career progression comes naturally when you, at once, work with something you like and it has impact/meaning. You have to find both.

Just need to figure out the right questions that can expose the core of the role and see if it's really what you want or if red flags will come up.

Obviously, there will be some products that viscerally excite you and others that don't, but let me elaborate: perhaps a company is working on a tool to help construction workers orchestrate cleanups at their work sites...or the company is working on a platform to help automate property management...whatever.

These may not seem as exciting, on the surface, as other products you may have seen out there, but it could be that digging into them further there are elements which will pique your interest. For example, perhaps the systems that need to be built in support of these products are particularly complex or they present particular scaling challenges, etc.

The underlying product may not be super interesting to you, but it could be that the engineering work involved in them is actually more interesting than some other product that feels more exciting to you. Or perhaps the business or operations side of these companies is very interesting and well-executed and there are things to learn on that front.

I'm not expressing this very well, but my main point is that there can be a divergence between products that are interesting and work that is interesting - often times the less exciting product presents more interesting/challenging work. To see that, you need to take into account the entire equation: the biggest challenges the company is facing, the long-term strategy, how sharp the business/ops side of the company is, etc.

Keep an open mind; things that, at first glance, don't seem interesting may turn out to involve _very_ interesting/rewarding work.

I currently work for an extremely large multi-national company on a really mundane sounding use case with a pretty vanilla Data stack. What we build has direct impact to our customers. That means that we can map what we are building to our customer experience, which means we need to understand the impact of what we make and use that to balance the various Engineering tradeoffs. I don't feel like I'm doing bullshit work.

I had another job cool sounding job with all sorts of buzzwords, including "AI." When I told people the use cases we were looking at and who I reported to, everybody thought I was doing some amazing stuff. Literally 90% of my work was chasing down BS ideas from VPs who seemed to want to find more complex ways of justifying their decisions. That job was the coolest sounding job I had and was 100% bullshit because nothing I was doing had any real impact on anything.

Bullshit work is not interesting, no matter how cool sounding it is.

One piece of advice I can give is to try asking during interviews what are the most interesting projects the interviewers did and why. It will give you a rough idea about what they are doing and if you would enjoy working there.

Also, I don't think there is any correlation between career progression and interesting projects. You can grow working on interesting or boring projects. The important thing is what you learned and what you achieved.

It sounds so boring but it turns out that every state has their own process (that they change without notifying you) and they use different pieces of data to identify workers and companies. Also everything was still paper-based so we got a scanned image and OCR text.

This was 10 years ago and we were doing fairly large scale NLP in PHP, matching millions of documents to claimants and companies and doing some amount of fraud detection.

It's still among the most interesting projects I've worked on.

However, all works and companies do not incentivize doing whatever work interestingly.

A few questions I use for potential employers:

- What's one idea that you came up with and implemented, in order to make your company better? What was that process like? (Read: find out how much the company supports bottom-up innovation)

- What's the process for getting adopting a new dev tool or standing up a new server at your company? (Read: differentiate between command/approval-driven companies and need/self-serve companies)

- All the basic boring stuff: What's your CVS system? Is code visible across the organization? What's your knowledge system? Are documents searchable and visible across the organization? What's your CICD system? (Read: make sure you aren't walking into a dumpster fire where basic hygeniene has been neglected)

For some forms the system actually put all the information from various sources on a digital recreation of the paper form we received and faxed it off. We only did that for the most common forms though.

I learned so much about database schemas and performance, since as I'm sure you've seen you often receive claims just before (or sometimes after) the response was due and if they're a minute late the claim gets paid by default and if the claim is due at 4:30 the HR person will casually log in at 4:28 to upload several documents and fill out a lengthy form.

I chose to optimize for higher salary. I plan to get back into the nonprofit and social good world later in my career.

Even if you are not a long-term thinker, just doubling your pay for a year is almost like being able to skip work for 9 months after.

High paying jobs come with other externalities (managers who are beyond caring for anything other than their cars's model years, deadlines which are about some VP's travel schedule etc), which suck while it is happening, but having the ability to just step away from it for a 3-6 month period afterwards makes you feel less trapped in that.

The pain is real, but feeling less trapped can alleviate the suffering.

That's not to say that you should rush into a burnout factory, but getting paid more has immediate consequences to your time-value at a young age - I took a sabbatical at 28 years old, which was triggered by personal issues, but the fact that I could stop work & not worry about rent for 3 months was a big factor in actually doing it.

I'm about to take a big break to recover from burnout, and while I don't expect to have trouble getting back into the market next year, I'm not sure it's something I could do repeatedly without my resume looking suspicious.

There's really only 3 kinds of money.

There's "I don't have to worry if I'll make rent or be able to buy groceries this month" money.

There's "I don't have to think about prices or when I go out to dinner" money.

And then there's "I can take unpaid time off whenever I feel like it, and travel to where I feel like" money.

Past that, everything is just bigger numbers.

It always resonated with me, because (a) it phrased money (which doesn't really matter directly) in terms of outcomes (which do matter directly), (b) it coalesced things down into a few, very different outcome buckets, & (c) it made the observation that in terms of life outcomes, there's definitely a ceiling: unless you're looking for ways to blow money, there's a cap on how much you can reasonably spend.

There are all kinds of projects that are potentially useful but not necessarily profitable. Having more millions of dollars means you could do more of them.

You see people here complaining that they can't go from $500k to $600k and everyone says that they're being greedy. But the dissatisfaction is a lot stronger at that range, and it only goes up when people become millionaires.

I think it's quite important to check that you're eating because you're hungry and not out of habit/greed/pride.

People who want "exactly one million, not less, not more" are less frequent in population than people for whom no amount of money is ever enough.

As for product fit: AI, blockchain, security are... very different subfields. There's a subtle but important difference between being interested in something vs being interested in the idea of something. Do you know pandas? Do you have experience running a cryptocurrency node? Do you know what are elliptic curves? Being interested in a product means gravitating towards being hands on in them without being prompted. If you're not getting success w/ job applications because you're expecting to get your foot in the door first and expect to be coached on the job, that might not be a viable career path for you in the first place. People who are actually interested in ML study it on their own time. This goes for people in the industry too, not just college kids - I know a number of people w/ a decade+ dev experience taking ML courses and reading up on the literature, and that's only for ML... blockchains have their own literature and so does security, and there's not necessarily a whole lot of overlap.

A classical example of being interested in the idea of something is getting into AAA game development and then proceeding to burn out a couple of years later because of the realization that modern AAA game development generally means working on minutiae like a cog in a machine, rather than being involved in a end-to-end creation process. Another variation is thinking you could "pivot", from, say, frontend development in coinbase to more "interesting" work on actual crypto, but due to the gap in relevant experience and lack of go-get-it attitude, that never happens.

My advice would be: take the pay increase if the alternative is nothing, and figure out exactly what subfield you want to pivot into and proactively put some work to become desirable in that field.

Sure, working for a Crypto exchange might be more fun and look cooler, but if they have 10 customers and you are constantly under pressure to hack stuff into production for an egomaniac CEO, it is not a great environment to grow and work in.

So personally I wouldn’t be so quick to write off the boring or unsexy opportunities. Especially early in your career when you need to learn how to do things properly.

I was before in a AI startup for health with AI in the company name. In fact there was no AI… just a simp’e rule base model with a few parameters on a feature not a single customer used. But hey we added AI in every marketing material and job description. So be very careful and ask the right questions. It can however help to land the next job as everyone thought I work for an interesting startup doing AI, so the bullshit goes on.

I know that is a dark way to look at things, but it is also quite pragmatic. People spend so much of their careers building up wealth, skills, and power, hoping for a future day when it all will give them everything they wanted. But often you can build the life you want earlier in life by looking at your options holistically, trying to balance satisfying and meaningful work that you could be proud of in the short term... while also making enough money and building skills to carry you forward if you are lucky enough to get a long-term.

I have always tried to strike that balance - I don't work for below market rate just to get meaningful work, but neither do I seek out the highest paycheck. I look for work that adds some value to the world.

One of the reasons I have a aversion to this question is that it's usually followed by "follow your passion" or something equally trite.

However, I do think it's useful when you are in a situation you hate and you wonder if it's worth leaving. Yes, definitely leave that.

If you have an "okay" job that lets you maximize your mental health and time for other things (e.g. family), maybe you'll feel like you made the right career tradeoff when that bus hits you.

It is not pleasant for me to imagine life w/o my family. We are certainly not perfect, but we try to be a benefit to each other, and we are. Our parents (who are now great-grandparents) have set examples of long-term unselfishness, which helps. Others can do that to start such trends and traditions of their own. So worthwhile.

https://www.owleyes.org/text/walden/read/economy#root-14

—Yosemite golden-age climber Eric Jay Beck

There are many ways to happiness, sometimes you can just go for it directly, sometimes you build some security on your way there.

There were some other HN discussions where I commented in more detail, and the containing discussions also have interesting comments. (And maybe I'm a cataloguing personality, and like these ideas...):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129921

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23452651

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28867645

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553508 (this one has a bunch of HN links to discussions on internal motivation)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708786

Use 1-2 years there to upskill in area you care about. Effectively work minimum needed to get a good review from them. Then apply again to area you want to work in, with new salary as your standard.

Will take patience and perseverance.

But to more broadly agree with your point, I do think if one job pays you a lot more than the other, on average that's because they value you more, and they will be a lot less likely to waste your time. If you work for 50k a year, your CEO will be happy to have you work on all sorts of stupid things because you're cheap so why not. If they pay you 500k a year, they're going to want to make sure that whatever you work on is actually important to the business because now when the accountants add up costs you are going to be more significant. Furthermore, psychologically it's hard not for a boss to value someone making 500k more than one making 50k a year.

I'm sure there are many, many exceptions where people are paid poorly and working on super interesting or important things (medical research being a common example), or paid well to work on meaningless stuff, but as a rule of thumb, I do think higher paying jobs tend to be better jobs independently of the bigger paycheck.

That's true when we're talking about a difference between 8$/h and 20$/h. If we're talking 50$/h vs 100$/h, or 100$/h vs 200$/h, I'm willing to take the bet that higher-paying job is going to be challenging enough. But indeed, it's also up to the person - in one job you may fix code, in another you may set up processes for entire teams, and if you just want to be left alone to code stuff that you like, what I said is absolutely not true (the opposite is - at some point you start to have to code less). Some other commenter nailed it - higher paid jobs tend to be more impactful. Whether "interesting" or not, that's subjective.

The most important thing about a new job in my opinion is not the technology you work with or the company you work for, but the PEOPLE, you work with / for...

Are they experienced? Motivated? Professional? How nerdy are they? How arrogant? Does the team work together or is it a toxic relationship? Are things like Coding Dojos, Pair Programming, Code Reviews, etc. well established? Is your potential boss fine with this or not?

The problem often is getting to know the team before you actually starting the job. I always ask for a "training day" to see, how the team is working on daily tasks...

Choosing the right "Team" and building trust over YEARS and having a work-life-balance is the most important step to build deep knowledge and still have fun, regardless in what technology. Much more important for "happiness" than money or hype hunting. If you are passionate for what you do, you will build confidence and learn much more than on the other path.

Just my 2 cents.

Life is short though, once your base needs are met, figure out what you want to work on and spend more time on whatever that is.

1. The space and how exciting it is (AI, Blockchain, etc)

2. My personal growth (learning, but also compensation & rate of career progression)

3. The people (especially who is my direct manager)

Ideally, you can get all three in a job! However, when I can't, then every single time, #3 has contributed more towards my job satisfaction than #1 and #2. However, over-indexing on #3 alone is also sub-optimal.

Even "boring" spaces often have hard problems and if you dig into the problems, then the work can become intellectually interesting. It may not be sexy or shiny, but you need to decide how much you want to index on that. If you are getting intellectual fulfillment in your day-to-day, better personal growth (including compensation growth), and work with & for good people, then that's a pretty good deal. Don't undervalue doubling your salary. It can provide optionality down the road to work on other things, like folks have said below.

Early in my career I worked on what is seemingly boring stuff but the internal engineering problems were surprisingly complex and therefore interesting, even though my "resume bullet" for that stint may appear boring to a reader. Also, the people I worked with were just the nicest and I couldn't imagine leaving that team.

I still look back on that period as the happiest time of my professional life, even though I now make many times the compensation and work on some really externally "sexy" stuff. Nostalgia might be playing into that, but I do remember being pretty happy on a day-to-day basis.

The counterpoint is that I did eventually leave that team and that company because my career was not moving fast enough and I would not have hit the financial goals I had for my family's wellbeing.

I spent a decade doing sexy problems in science, got paid squat.

Now I'm in tech making 4-5x what I was doing, while using the skills I gained from there in a less sexy but much more lucrative pursuit. My team is great, so I am lucky in that regard.

Make hay while you can. The fact you have these choices is great, but career progression is what you make of it.

You are right in that the skills I have gave me some opportunity, but I think I could have done without the last 3y of academia trying to make it work :).

Funnily enough, my current job has been one of my favorites. There are always creative and interesting problems to solve. The feedback from my team and from the customers is also rewarding.

I certainly have some itches that I need to scratch in terms of personal projects, but generally, I'm satisfied with just how involved and exciting my "boring" job is.

Don't get discouraged if you're not seeing what you want right away. Consider cutting your teeth with some not-so-appealing companies. It may turn out that it's not so boring to you. And also, you'll get some additional experience for when those jobs turn up later.

"You do one for the money, one for the art, one for the money, one for the art, and one because you owe your friend a favor."

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneForTheMoneyOn...

your career is long :) do both!

At one point, I personally took a short-term pay cut in order to join AWS, an organization I once really wanted to work with. Ultimately, the decision paid off, both financially and career wise; hard to put a price on working with great people, building great products, and stretching oneself.

Don't get me wrong, money is important and making that leap of 2x might be the right move for you, right now. That choice will also be advantageous when it comes to future negotiations. But if you are early on in your career, you might want to find a position that allows you to master your craft.

I dropped that and never looked back. My career is very happy, enjoyable, well paid.

As usual there are exceptions in every context, but what you seem to be doing is similar, I believe that focusing on the product is wrong.

Working on a type of product has little connection to the type of work that is going to be performed, which could be boring or very different from what expected.

My thought has always been: focus on the type of work you want to do, the rest comes naturally (potentially even passion for a new product!)

You could try to find a product that interests you intrinsically rather than based on marketing? If you have passions, it's rarely a bad idea to pursue them unless the industry exploits said passion (ie, games industry). Failing that, money's always nice.

I regret not leaving. Nothing has changed at my current job, but I think there is something to be said for the possibility of finding yourself at a local instead of a global maximum. I would hinge a lot of this on your age, but especially if you are on the younger side, I think we undersell the value of leveling yourself up professionally so that perhaps at the NEXT opportunity you will have even more choices. I would factor into the companies that maybe you are not so keen on working on, if whether or not getting exposure to that work, the salary, title, etc. would cause you to in a short while be better position to explore and even wider and potentially more exciting set of opportunities. I think it is to not think about that effect.

I worked for a time at a startup with decent salary in a generalist role, such that sometimes I did things directly related to my skillsets and interests, and other times got to pick up entirely new skillsets. This broadened my horizons significantly and put me in a decent position financially, though nowhere near FIRE.

After that I took a pay cut to pursue something fun and interesting (moving to a new country to help an old colleague establish a research group). This gave me a chance to work on my own projects and passions but also pulled me out of the fast-paced and wide-reaching environment that you find in a startup. The freedom is great but the cash compensation hurts a bit, so the rest of the package has to make up for it -- most days it does.

All things considered, you can find interesting things to do (and people to do them with) in most positions. Taking one with higher compensation and comparable commitment of time and energy is rarely a mistake. Especially if that compensation makes you financially independent with reasonable probability.

>Have you ever been in that position? What did you do?

Yes, I chose the "boring" job that with fabulous compensation. (It was proprietary accounting systems and it paid better than FAANG.) I spent 10+ years at it and made a lot of money but it's also one of my biggest regrets. Consider 2 groups:

- (group A) prioritize money more than the particular job. They can compartmentalize the boring job and do the fun stuff on the weekend.

- (group B) people prioritize interesting work more than the money. As long as the job offers a decent salary, that's good enough.

I thought I was in group A but it turns out I was actually in group B.

However... the big caveat with my anecdote... The problem with answering your question is that the right choice depends on _your_ personality.

What-ifs are an impossible dilemma, and I wouldn't stress on what type of person I am: I know I change, so I am a different person at different points in time (and in large part, due to circumstances).

It sounds like you could comfortably take a couple years off to do whatever you regretted not doing earlier, and by the end of it, you should have no regrets. If you do, however, plan your days like it's work (I've taken multi-year leave, and I behaved as if I have all the time in the world, and I didn't really achieve much of what I wanted to ;-).

The product doesn't matter. You will find interesting challenges in any problem domain. But your coworkers and management will make the difference between looking forward to each day and dreading each day.

It took more than a year, and quite a bit of rejection before I found a company I liked, with the benefit of more money.

I’m very happy I made the move. It took a long time and a lot of faith that I would find something better.

There are some programmers that love to program, and as long as they get to do that, they’re happy. Some are happy to do whatever so long as they’re making boatloads of cash and time to spend it. For me it’s engaging work in a space I’m interested in

And I regret the times where I let money decide. It usually felt like "Ok, I'll just do this for a few years, make a boatload of money and then move on".

In retrospect it feels like I wasted those years. Life is so much bigger than a bank account. Time is priceless.

I wholeheartedly agree, but working at a company is selling time no matter how interesting the technology might be. It's not the same as working on personal projects; there will always be unpleasant aspects to it, certainly after more time passes (I've been through more M&A than I care to think about).

If the goal is to stop selling your time, then double the salary would achieve that goal twice as fast, assuming the job is at least tolerable. Never work for a shit hole where you dread coming in, but money is a means to an end. Money is freedom.

Maybe it's just the things I like to do don't lend themselves to actual products but instead are the shoulders which others often need to stand on to actually make products. But I don't think I've ever worked in a company where the main product was something I am passionate about, but all my jobs have been jobs I've been passionate about (at least at the beginning of each job).

If the job offers you're getting are to do interesting things to help make boring products, take it! Learn and do the interesting parts that you like.

I'm more interested in stability now. On my last job hunt i was avoiding some more interesting work in favor of stability. I was in my late 30s at the time and just didnt want to go through all the start up problems I've experienced in the past.

That all said, I'm on a small team now working on an ecommerce site. It seems like a boring job, but I've been surprised at how much I've been able to use "interesting" tech to solve problems. You actually dont know when that boring job might be exactly what you want.

It`s all about where you want to go. Then when you reach there, you can move to jobs where you can do the same but for more money or for more interesting conditions.

For example: a friend of mine wanted to be an engineering manager. She worked for 10 years with this objective in mind. At year 8 she become one, but in a sucky place. Now at year 10 she is still an engineering manager but in a place that pays more. Her next objective is to find an engineering manager position with both good pay and interesting work.

If you want to increase your ability to get the jobs you want, working at a well-known firm for a few years is the most straightforward way to boost your resume. People with a few years of Google or Microsoft on their resume often move to the front of the line for hiring.

Take one of the well-paying jobs. Do well, leave a good impression, and network well among the people you meet. Re-evaluate in a few years. Who knows, you may discover you like these companies a lot more than you think. If not, your resume will be well-prepped for the next move.

Career progression is great, but there is an upper ceiling as long you want to still code. Only renumeration can still go up on some point.

I guess I'd try and project out lines for what happiness and financial security look like for both choices, over a couple of decades. Keeping in mind that you can jump onto the other line now, or 5/10/20/etc years from now.

My first advice would be that if you can double your salary, do it. We don't know what tomorrow will be made of.

Also you don't mention work-life balance and quality of relationships with colleagues which to me is more important than interest in the product.

That being said, you can also keep interviewing and try to find a job which checks all the boxes.

The money will follow. Maybe not in the same quantity, but money has a diminishing ROI after a certain point versus working on things you want to work with.

Personally I find it fairly obvious. And while you take that new job and money, nothing prevents you from training in one of those fields that interest you more…

There are countless nonprofits that need your help solving tech problems and you can face some compelling real-world challenges that need very clever solutions to overcome.

Either sounds good. I have neither.

I'd go with money. Get enough of it and you can focus on the products you want to work on, including personal ones.

there are a lot of people looking for jobs right now with keywords AI, blockchain, cybersecurity

meanwhile many disciplines struggle to find decent candidates due to lack of interest

Personally I’ve found the opposite, a lot of the domains I’m interested in are interested in people who are… not me. Conversely I’m mildly confident with a little bit of investment I could get some blockchain startup to hire me.

Sam wanted a job that matters, so he rejects the offer. Then the conversation follows along the lines of: "you want the job after this job, but this is the job standing in the way".

In this context, I understand by that: focus on career progression, and then switch to "save the world".

The advice I give to my personal friends is that they should never accept a role that is not 50 - 100% better (or more) across multiple dimensions including pay, skills, product, team, life / work balance, manager. I tell my personal friends that they shouldn't take any job which is not "transformational" to them in some way.

I tell my friends: If you are not jumping out of your seat for this opportunity, don't do it.

This market is crazy, exploding, lots of innovation and hiring. And if you are not finding something interesting in this market: The problem is either your search strategy, your profile / behavior or your network / relationships.

If I were you, I would focus on evolving my search strategy to get away from knocking on the front door and work on relationship building. And if there is something materially wrong with your skill / experience / qualification profile versus some of these jobs: Be completely realistic about what you are missing and go fix it.

When I wanted to become a tech evangelist, I couldn't get jobs because I only had 4 / 10 of what those roles needed. So I spent 6 months systematically closing the gaps in my story and the next job, I got it right away. Be incredibly realistic: Do you have 100% of the check boxes needed for the jobs you want? IF not, go and fix it. This is one area where being able to take an honest, hard look at yourself versus what is wanted is going to pay off.

Get on LinkedIn and Twitter, talk directly to decision makers (or "friendlies" who will talk to you at the target company list). Do more information gathering before trying to apply.

Be prepared to tell people: "Hey, if you see anything like X,Y,Z - Let me know. I am looking for jobs like that." Sometimes it takes weeks or months, but people remember and will send you opportunities. The more seeds like that you plant, the better you will do in six months.

The internet makes people feel like they just need to click to apply. It often doesn't work that way.

Finally: I have found that certain industries have "Super Networkers" who kind of help everyone and are known by everyone and are connected to everyone. I strongly recommend trying to find and make friends with these super networkers / community organizers because they are often the most accessible gateways to breaking into an industry.

Go make friends with these people, let them know what you are looking for and ask them to refer anything they see. This is way more effective to get really good leads in my experience.