If you’re considering getting out, I would encourage it. Getting back to working on primarily technical problems, rather than social/communication scaling ones, has been great for my overall happiness.
I started my career in scientific computing, and was paid a pittance compared to what a PE is paid at a big tech company.
I’m wondering if moving to scientific computing is a luxury afforded by putting in time at AWS.
No, it's a lot for 4-5 years anywhere. This is on top of a pretty decent salary. For most working folk, putting this much aside in cash-equivalent over entire career is hard.
GP is talking about going from a high base salary to decent base salary, while using the extra comp (estimated here at approx 1mm) to smooth the impact of the drop in base. This is very manageable.
On the other hand, if you spend your early career as a researcher making five digits a year in the Midwest, then move to SV in middle age to increase your earnings, you probably won’t ever catch up and be able to live very comfortably given the cost of housing.
This is just a possible counterpoint, learned the hard way, to the common advice to “pursue your passion.” My advice to those who have the option: make some money first, then pursue your passion.
I get paid $110,000 per year, and have great benefits. It feels like plenty to me, even though I don't save nearly as much anymore.
I agree it's a luxury from putting in time at AWS. I don't think I'd be as comfortable (psychologically, anyway) if I had gone straight to academia.
As I mentioned below, I got into this field by emailing a professor out of the blue, essentially saying “Hi, I am a software engineer interested in working on astronomy software. What’s your world like?”
This is not to say that non-technical skills are not important and often more important, but for both myself and friends "getting paid well" and "working on hard problems" have become conflicting goals.
There was a brief while, at the beginning of our current tech boom where strong technical skills were extremely valuable. What initially attracted me to software was hanging out with some absolutely brilliant software folks working on very hard problems, and getting paid better than anyone else I knew.
I'm perpetually disappointed that after many, many years of honing my technical skills I find that if I want to use them 9-5 I have to choose to be paid considerably less, and scour far and wide to find those jobs. I've now decided that it's best to treat my passion for technical problems the same way I would any other non-work related hobby. Similar to the way that being an avid reader and book lover is nice, but ultimately not that important if you want to work at Barnes and Noble selling books.
The generalized version is that anything widely desirable about a job other than money acts to push down wages. For example, if a position is widely respected, well most people like to be respected so wages are going to be less than if it wasn’t widely respected. Similarly, if there’s a lot of people that enjoy spending time with children then jobs that involve spending a lot of time with children aren’t going to pay as well as they would have otherwise. See also, games programming.
I think I'm okay at leading a team but moving me to a staff engineer position would be better for me and the company and I think my leader knows this. The experience has been enlightening and I have a lot more respect for non-technical managers now.
I think it's pretty easy to find tons and tons of scientific groups that are absolutely dying to find more professional programmers - at least in physics and astronomy, but probably in lots of disciplines. Feel free to email me if you'd like to talk more.
Were you able to get something in a similar range as what levels.fyi lists for an Amazon Principle Engineer ($640,000 [0])?
Or did you become financially independent from the Amazon comp which allowed you to not care about the new lower salary?
[0] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Amazon/salaries/Software-Engi...
Now, I get $110,000 per year. That's plenty. I have a family, but my wife works too in tech and has a good income.
The marginal value of the extra income from working in big tech just wasn't worth it for me.
If you had it to do over again, would you chose to go into the area that you’re especially interested in and sacrifice ever getting the high FAANG comp?
Or do you feel that having that savings invested has given you the long term security to feel comfortable, but perhaps if you’d made ~80% less over your career you’d be less satisfied?
I think my path was probably a good one; it really is very psychologically nice to not worry at all about money and be able to advance my career in any direction I want now without feeling like I am being selfish, or neglecting my responsibilities as a father, or whatever.
I also certainly learned a lot at Amazon (although the thing I learned most was “how to be effective inside Amazon,” which isn’t a particularly great skill in the long run!). So it was not so bad.
Can you speak more to this? Why is being effective inside Amazon different from being effective at any other large organization?
But I also learned things like:
- How do I most effectively advocate for headcount within Amazon's yearly budget process?
- Who is the right person to go to in AWS Networking when we think we have a possible performance problem in the network stack?
- What is AWS AppSec really looking for when a design is going through a security review? (and what are they not looking for)
These have a little applicability, but mostly they're the inside knowledge that just comes from time and experience inside the organization. You learn the shibboleths that open doors or get people to listen to you on the first try. Sorta useful, but mostly not very interesting to me personally.