Early 30s confusion. Advice needed.

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DeCouPleCn

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Welocalize
DeCouPleCn
Apr 18 11 Comments

A little bg info about me.

I graduated from college in 2011 and then started my career as a TOEFL/GRE/GMAT teacher. In 2016, I decided to pursue a master degree in Translation/language teaching and came to the States. From 2016 I began to be exposed to the idea of "Localization" and "Internationalization" (basically the process of bringing an IT product to a different market).

Impressed by what coding and programming can do in the translation/localization industry, I started to learn coding in 2017. It didn't turn out to be as hard as I thought. I was able to finish a few projects (e.g., a twitter-like social media platform) by the time i graduated in May 2018.

Unfortunately since the program I was in was not in STEM I could not find an engineering job upon graduation. My first job at States was a "localization project manager" at a language service provider. With a 42.5k TC, I stayed there for about 8 months before landing my second job as a "localization engineer" at another language service provider.

The second job paid better (now it was 82.5k). The responsibilities included some coding for project automation. I was able to further enhance my coding skills with some real work scenario. However, 99% times the coding was just project-based or just like a script to do file parsing/handling. Regardless, I learned a lot.

The second company sponsored H1B for me so I finally had some job security. Since last November, I started to do leetcode and was able to finish about 250 questions. I started to look for another opportunity this January, and finally was able to land a localization-engineer-like opportunity at Microsoft. Now they are offering me a 170k TC.

I was told by the hiring manager that perhaps an ideal career path for me is to start at this localization Engineering role at MSFT, and when the I140 is done I can try to jump to a real SDE role. As promising as it sounds like, I myself am a little bit unsure: for one thing, this July I'll turn 33. Not sure if this is a good age to start switching wholly to another career.

So what do you guys think I should be doing? Should I set my goal as being a full time developer as suggested by the hiring manager? Or, as my friend advised, I was quite into localization for a couple of years. maybe I should stay in this track and maybe seek to become the manager in product localization moving forward?

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