First time posting here. I'm hoping to get some valuable / helpful thoughts to make a decision between two offers. Job 1 - Senior Software Engineer - Data. Full Time Salary at Startup with plenty of funding. Offering base plus equity. Culture seems good. Growing like crazy. Not yet profitable. Already other data engineers on scene. Likely not architecting big data platforms but using what they already got and writing more data pipelines and Spark jobs. Job 2 - Data Engineer W2 Hourly for large casino through staffing company. Greenfield project to build everything in the cloud. Getting rid of Teradata. Most likely automate data pipelines and Spark clusters in Azure. Vendor locked to Azure. More opportunity to influence the architecture and learn from some chief digital transformers. Casino contract job pays higher but after taking into account benefits like insurance and time off and the potential to see the equity when vested in job 1, then job 1 pay is higher. Job 2 is riskier because it could only be a 6 month contract although they said it would take multiple years to do everything they want to do. Also, if the world keeps getting crazier then it may be harder to find a job if something falls through with the project and I'm laid off. However, it seems there could be lots of growth if I'm being mentored by the project manager who has done digital transformations of companies before. Casino mentioned they will hire full time employees from contractor pool once things are finished to maintain the systems. The startup seems like a safe bet, but doesn't utilize all of my experience of architecting and implementing data lakes and warehouses from scratch, work could potentially be not as exciting due to this. But with a good culture, will I care? It's hard to build a culture full of contractors when they come and go on a large project for a corporation. The startup isn't public yet so getting in before it explodes even more could be really cool. I have never been part of something like that before. However, the casino data job has a leader I really admire. I'm terrible with making decisions this big but I need something to push me over to one or the other. #engineering #dataengineers #dataengineering #dataengineer #data #joboffer #helpeme
Casino. With a caveat on the stage of your career. They seem on the surface just about the same - writing Spark jobs and data pipelines. It's hard to know what the day to day will look like. The decision comes down to work culture, where you think you'll learn more, and colleagues. Start up has a bigger risk of WLB compromise / grind / burn out. It also has bigger risk of big egos, in my experience. The contract role, assuming it is generally staffed by other contractors, will just be filled with people getting paid to get the job done. You won't work crazy hours. You already expressed that there's a leader you are excited to work with. And more opportunity to do the design and architecture. Now depending on your age and stage of your career... you might consider the startup if you are younger and haven't done anything like that before. Also higher chance of making big bank.
Thank you for this! Haven't thought about WLB yet or egos. I will be asking some of my potential co-workers if they run into these. I just turned 30, did 6 years of all sorts of coding at a small company from 17-23 - web development, firmware engineering, and a little bit of management. 23-29 5 years of Big Data and Cloud Computing. Heavy on the infrastructure like DevOps and automation specific to Big Data and also consulting and doing projects. Lots of face time with clients. Last year - ran a 1 man data engineering department for a company that never had one. Very small company. Now slowly dying due to Covid. Built them a data warehouse, data pipelines, migrated them to Kubernetes for all of their apps, and got them a BI tool for the first time. Feel like I got lots of experience, but always SO SO much more to learn.
Oh and both are fully remote. The contract job requires some travel up front which I don't mind. Salaries are higher than what local developers make here but lower than Silicon Valley :)