u/voreno87

Hi,
I’m a backend dev with 3+ yoe.

I got a job with a small fintech startup (4 devs) where we would have to wear several hats.

They are going to prod next month and they will hire a consultant devops/security for helping out during the next three months.

I have been told I will shadow him with the idea I will own that part but the main responsibility will be backend development with Java.

The infra stack is AWS (EC2, S3, ECR, CodeDeploy) some terraform, grafana, Prometheus, etc

I’m new to AWS, I have used in a side project ECS, Cloudformation and some other stuff but it was using LocalStack.

Given the bast amount of resources available for AWS, any recommendations for getting up to speed? (I will join in two weeks)

Thanks

Hi,

I would like to know opinions of the community on my situation.

Im a software engineer with 4 yoe. I just got layoff from my job due to the bad economy (not performance related) but I got 5 months of severance so it’s not too bad, I also have some savings to last a few more months. I was working there for 7 months.

And the moment I’m dealing with depression, anxiety and insomnia due to other reasons, obviously being layoff doesn’t help. Also to mention that my levels of stress tolerance are quite low in general.

I would say that my skills are average for my yoe, the reason being because the insomnia always has messed with me, making me tired. But for some reason people tend to think that I’m much better than I am, maybe because I show enthusiasm when I speak about programming.

My career so far has been in the trading space and I want to continue there because I like it, the thing is that my salary has been pretty low, not all trading companies pay that well.

I got an offer from a very small trading company (only three devs plus couple traders and the directors) and the salary is low, just 5k more than I was making before. The devs looked like nice people.

When I had the interview with the directors, they told me several times that the expectations are very high, it’s a high pressure environment with a very tight deadlines. Also is expected to be on call always and because we are a small team, we need to wear several hats, like devops work, backend, work closely with the traders etc.

As learning experience it looks amazing, but they have made clear that the work life balance will be bad, and the stress would be very high. Because of that the pay hour rate would be lower than What I was making before…

Giving my personal situation I don’t think I can survive an environment like that to be honest, my insomnia could get worse and I could end up quitting or being fired if I can’t keep up with the pace.

The other option is to reject the offer and focus on interview prep (DSA and system design), low latency Java (the niche I want to specialise in) and focus on improving the mental health. And in one month start applying and see if I can get a better paying job without that huge expectations.

What do you guys think?