[Career Crossroads] Surviving as an FDE

Two companies have offered me a job, and their strengths are so different

that I’ve been losing sleep over it.

Company A is the textbook work-life-balance company. That lines up with [family] being the number-one thing in my value system, but still—

Pros: 4.5-day workweek, 30-minute commute, team lead position, advertising (where data really matters)
Cons: 0% performance bonus, team lead position… (read: management)

Company B is the textbook work-life unbalance company… but then, I have debts to pay.

Pros: salary, performance bonus, an engineering role
Cons: nominally engineering, but I’d probably end up doing every odd job there is; less time with my family…

Honestly, neither list seemed to win.

So I started asking what else there was to weigh,

and in the end I had no choice but to think all the way out to my next career step.

Down the road, do I want to be an AI leader, or an FDE—an engineer?

For me,

I like building the thing that’s actually needed.

Which calls for:

-the communication it takes to find out what’s actually needed

-the problem-framing ability to define and distill the core need

-defining the metrics that will show whether it actually worked

-having solved the problem you’ve defined before

-the troubleshooting ability to handle whatever goes wrong along the way

-the ability to finish—to solve it and close it out

-a systems view, so you’ve thought through enough of the edge cases that no new problems crawl out later

and so on.

And I think it’s this whole arc that I love.

Solving new problems, especially, is just fun to me.

Code happens to be the tool I solve them with.

For now, I’m going to keep building my career as an FDE.