u/Athen65

My company has been pushing AI pretty hard, even though most of us are juniors. Me and another junior are on a fairly established project, but working in one area that is very very greenfield, not a lot of shared infra or code. He uses Cursor for literally anything, I think he doesn't even write code anymore. If I'm to keep pace with him, I have to hand basically everything I do to claude code (cause I use neovim, btw) and it's causing my skills to atrophy.

I've been combatting this by spending my freetime learning more about cloud and devops to round out my skills, but there's so much offloading that I'm having trouble following along with what our current design is. Anyone know how to bridge the gap of code understanding in this situation?

A good work life balance, work that is interesting and/or genuinely helps people and/or where you make an actual impact, and good pay/benefits.

After being in the industry for a couple years, all the jobs I've seen have one or two of those, but none that I've seen have all three. For example - depending on your team and org - big tech generally has good WLB and good pay. Smaller orgs generally have high impact work with great WLB but peanuts for pay. Startups tend to have high impact work and great pay, but atrocious WLB.

Before you lampoon me with counterexamples, these are generalizations and I know you can find smaller orgs with great pay and larger orgs with great WLB and high impact/interesting work. This is just a trend I've noticed while casually exploring my options. Do you all generally agree with that assessment though or have you noticed something different?