Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice from people who have moved from a large organisations into a smaller company.

I’m currently in Big4 cybersecurity consulting. The role is stable, hybrid, decent experience for consulting, and gives me exposure to large enterprise clients and mature security environments.

I recently received an offer from a well-established fintech/crypto company with fewer than 100 employees. I would be their first dedicated security engineer, working directly with the CTO and building the security program from the ground up.

The tradeoff is basically:

• Current role: Big4 brand, large clients, stable environment, structured growth, 40hrs/week.
• New role: much more ownership, higher compensation, fully remote, unlimited PTO.
• Current comp: around $78K, likely $85K after promotion in few months
• New comp: $120K base + 20% bonus (144K TC)

For people who made a similar move from consulting or a large organization into a smaller company, How was it?

Did being the first security/security engineering hire help your long-term career, or did the lack of structure make it harder?

I’m mostly trying to understand the career risk vs. upside.

NOTE : I’m also in team matching for a Google L3 Security Engineer role, but it’s been around 9 months, so I’ve almost gave up.

Company is requiring devs to do unpaid on-call on my team. It would be for a whole sprint (2-weeks) every couple of months since its rotating between the members. We would need 24/7 availability, even on weekends. This is in ontario and was not discussed with the devs when we joined. There is nothing in the contract specifically regarding this. Wondering if there is any recourse or just look for a new place. Salaried, not hourly employee.

I'm a CS student who just finished their 4th year (doing 5) trying to think realistically about career direction given the current market.

From my perspective, traditional SWE paths seem increasingly oversaturated. The amount of effort and optimization required relative to the probability of landing strong roles seems a lot higher than it did a few years ago.

I do have internship experience at smaller/nontraditional companies, just not traditional big-tech SWE internships. I’ve also done sales and have been working on startup ideas, so my background has ended up being more mixed technical/business rather than a traditional dev role.

Because of that, I’ve been thinking more seriously about technical-business hybrid paths instead of traditional SWE.

Some paths I’ve been considering:
- product analyst / PM
- business analyst
- sales engineer
- SDR/BDR
- Salesforce consulting
- startup/operator-type roles

Interested in hearing from people who started in CS/tech but moved toward other careers. Which paths actually ended up having strong long-term upside/opportunity?

A bit about me - I graduated with a bachelor's in Computer Science in August 2023, and couldn't find a job for a whole year. I tried applying to every type of technical role - SWE, QA, Analyst, Help Desk, etc, and had no luck. So I pivoted to looking for a Sales job and found one pretty quickly.

I knew I didn't want to be actually be in Sales so I started applying to jobs again 4 months in and I landed a Junior Consultant role a small SaaS Company. That was an incredibly stressful and low paying job so I started applying to new roles 6 months into that job, and by some miracle I landed a Business Systems Analyst role at a Bank, which I've been in for 8 months now.

The first few months of this new job were glorious since I was in the honeymoon phase, I'm making 75k + bonus + rrsp matching, have great work life balance, and a great manager, I felt like I made it in life. But now that I'm 8 months in and no longer living life on survival mode, I'm remembering the ambitions I had when I started my CS degree of becoming a SWE and eventually working at a big Tech company, and I realize that I don't just want to settle at my new job at the bank. The version of me 2 years ago would be really happy with where I am now, but the version of me 6 years ago would be disappointed.

Also I know it sounds overconfident, but I already feel like I know everything there is to know in my BSA job at the bank. My team is responsible for doing configuration of our software for new client implementations, test planning, and a good bit of manual QA. This does involve some coding as parts of the configuration require writing scripts, and also I write SQL queries for validation/troubleshooting, but it is honestly nothing too complex. In 8 months, I genuinely know how to do majority of the role, and my manager trusts me more than some coworkers that have been in this kind of role for years. I just can't imagine doing this for 10+ years like many of coworkers have been doing, I crave working on more complex projects/problems during my 9-5. I also want to work with people much smarter than me to grow, and I don't think that kind of environment exists in BSA world in banks. My manager and lead are so incredibly intelligent, but then half of my other coworkers just make me wonder how they ever got the job.

Overall, a SWE role is really the only thing I feel like would give me what I'm looking for in my career, but I don't know if it's too late as it's been almost 3 years since I graduated and I have no SWE experience. So I guess I'm here to ask if people think it's still possible to make the transition and if you have any tips. Let's say I become amazing at Leetcode questions 6 months from now, do I have a shot, or is it very very low? Of course the hard part would be getting an interview. I suppose my other option would be trying to go the PM route, but being a PM just does not excite.

I know that AI has changed the role tremendously and that the SWE job market is more volatile as ever, but I just don't want to let go of this dream.

I was laid off in 2023 and ended up taking a contract role at a bank through an Indian consulting firm via a vendor. At the time, I didn’t push back much on the pay. it was lower than my previous role, but the workload was lighter and the work-life balance was actually decent.

Now that the contract has ended, I’ve been actively applying to full-time finance/IT roles. What’s strange is I’m barely getting callbacks for permanent positions, but I am getting contacted for contract roles through the exact same vendor/consulting setup.

What’s more frustrating is the pay. I was making around $55/hr before, and now I’m getting offers in the $40–45/hr range for essentially the same type of work, despite having more experience. And these roles don’t even offer incorporation options. It feels like I’m being lowballed repeatedly, just because they’re putting my name forward.

It also feels like the hiring model has completely shifted. Banks used to hire contractors directly, but now everything seems to be funneled through companies like TCS, HCL, Accenture, or Cognizant. If you’re not coming through them, it’s much harder to get in.

Given how small the Canadian IT market already is compared to the U.S., it’s frustrating to see so much of the hiring and the margins going through these layers instead of directly to the people doing the work.

I am applying to other roles and companies but not able to avoid these vendors since they call me when they learn I have worked at the particular bank.

Hey, current third year in CS at a Canadian university about to get a remote summer internship and my dads connection helped a lot. I had ~200 applications and started applying late in January but had no luck until I basically got referred in. How do I not feel guilty when some of my friends have been grinding a lot longer or how can I go about this.

I have taught myself web development and have decent projects, even did some freelancing but I know getting a summer internship has been harder than ever and it just feels like a shortcut i took.

Joined not too long ago as a backend engineer at a very large non-tech company.

I'm noticing everything is segregated / siloed.

The backend engineers don't create or update any cloud infrastructure, that belongs to the DevOps / cloud team. We also don't touch the database, that belongs to the database admins. When we propose a new data model, it requires coordination with like 50 other teams.

Day to day we're really just focused on writing code in the application / business logic layer, everything else is handled by other teams.

I'm used to working in smaller companies where the engineers own things end-to-end.

Is this normal or a huge red flag?

I’m a Manufacturing Engineer by profession and worked as a Process Engineer/Quality Management System Staff/Project Engineer before I shifted my career to Tech. I’ve worked in different big Tech consulting companies. It’s been 6 years but I’m not yet sure how would I like myself to focus as I’m okay working as a generalist. For the first 2 years of my career, I’m a Manual QA Engineer (80%) and a Salesforce Administrator (20%). In that year, I became an accidental QA Lead as our Team Lead resign so I had to take over. In my 3rd year and 4th year of my career, I got more exposure in System Analysis and Project Coordination (35%) but working still as Manual QA Engineer (65%) but same platform in Salesforce. In my 5th year in my career until present, I became an Enterprise Systems Analyst/Admin (80%) and a QA Lead (20%). I was the one who started the QA practice from scratch and I’m no longer platform dependent as we have multiple technologies connected to Salesforce that we managed, supported and tested.

To be honest, I find QA work repetitive at some point though it fits my personality as I’m curious and very much detailed oriented. On the other hand, I had fun working as a Systems Analyst/Admin as I can encounter different requests and different problems. In the advent of AI and becoming more platform agnostic, I want to diversify my skillset to be more competitive. I recently got my PMP certification on top of my Salesforce and other technology certifications.

Would it be wise if I want to shift to Project Management or Scrum Master or move up as a 100% QA Lead or there would be a better role for me considering my experience?

Hello everyone,

I'm a dual Canadian/Australian citizen, I grew up in Vancouver but have lived in Melbourne Australia since 2006. I still have my thick Canadian accent despite considering myself an Aussie.

I'm a software engineer at one of the few large tech companies we have in Australia, making about $162k AUD (total comp) in a fairly chill 9-5 role (38 hours per week). I have 4 YoE plus 5 years of experience in an unrelated field (economics/finance). I'm self taught, I code mostly in TypeScript doing full stack work.

Tech salaries in Australia are far lower than equivalent salaries in the USA, with the vast majority of careers peaking at less than $250k AUD (1:1 with CAD at the moment) even at staff level positions. Our tech industry is very small with lots of outsourcing to India.

I've been thinking about making the move back to Canada or to the USA for a few years to make some more $$$

My questions:

1. Do Canadians get the same high salaries as developers in the USA?
2. For anyone who has worked in Australia and Canada, how do they compare?
3. How easy is it for Canadian citizens to get a high paying tech job in the USA?
4. What Canadian cities are best to live in as a software engineer?

Cheers!

Background: 6 YOE, 5.5 at a big tech firm, the last 8 months or so I've been at a popular gig worker delivery company. In my late 20s, no kids.

Recently I got an opportunity to potentially join an agentic AI scaleup (TLDR a former peer of mine is now a manager there). The company is not OpenAI Anthropic level, maybe like a level below them. Hard to say whether they'll make it out, I think they're positioned well and have real customers that are sticky. They have about 500 employees and like $10B or something supposedly in their upcoming valuation round. I'd be working on their platform team. I don't think I'd get a level up, it'd probably be a lateral move.

Am I being an idiot for leaving my current job? Do you think it's a bad idea to leave so quickly (putting aside finances for a second)? My current job while uninteresting is stable.

My concerns is that if this place implodes for some reason I might have two consequentive short stints. But then the upside is that I could get some pre IPO equity and work on something that I think is cool/newest thing.

Thoughts?

I just graduated from Wilfrid Laurier (bdes ux + some cs background) like a month ago and kinda stuck on what to do

i got into University of Waterloo mmsc (co-op) and University of Calgary misp (cybersecurity)

background:

• ux portfolio (mostly school + one real chatbot project + a few end to end ux projects)
• no co-op/internships
• applied to ~100 ux roles, basically no responses
• working part time rn
• started network+ + learning wireshark
• ideally wanna pivot into cyber (more cloud side), but open to any tech role

how i see it:

University of Waterloo Management Science

https://uwaterloo.ca/future-graduate-students/programs/by-faculty/engineering/management-science-co-op-master-management-science-mmsc

• more like business + analytics (not super technical)
• main value is the 2 co-op terms → actual experience → hopefully return offer
• From what ive seen all my friends who went to waterloo got decent co-ops
• flexible so i can try ux / data / cloud / etc
• I wouldn't even consider it without co-op

University of Calgary misp

https://grad.ucalgary.ca/future-students/graduate/discover-opportunities/explore-programs/information-security-and-privacy-misp-course

• direct cybersecurity degree
• more technical + focused on security
• but internship is self-found (no guaranteed pipeline)
• more locked into cyber

if i didnt do either id prob just keep applying to ux + finish network+/security+ and try to break into IT → cyber

im okay waiting 1–2 years and spending money if it actually helps

my biggest fear is doing a masters and still ending up with no job after

what would u do in my position to actually maximize chances of getting hired in this market?

I applied for a role in a different department of the same company that I currrently work for. The job has a higher title than my current job. The low end of the salary range mentioned in the job posting is 3% lower than my current salary and high end is 43% higher. 
Today I recevied the offer. I am getting a 10% salary bump, so definitely closer to the lower end of the range. Is 10% increase the norm in the industry for internal candidates? I am already bringing a lot to the table being familiar with a lot of the prodcuts, procedures and tech stack and realistically do not need a lot of on-boarding. I was hoping to get a 20-30% salary bump. Is that too crazy for an internal candidate? How common is negotiating for interanl candidates and how should I go about it?
our communications have been mainly through slack. I am feeling I am falling victim to being internal candidate and the manager having visibility into my current salary

I graduated in 2020 and never found a job through COVID. I used that time to learn webdev, (HTML,CSS,JS,React,NodeJS,Express,AWS,etc). I made some projects, leetcode, but the only job I was able to do was some contract WordPress for people trying to start their own blogs. It never really paid the bills. I decided to go back to school. I have an offer for Carleton for a Masters of Computer Science. I heard that Masters of Applied Computing was mainly for people trying to immigrate, and wasn't worth much. However, the co-op at the end of course work sounds very tempting to me. Would it be better to go MSC or go Masters of Applied Computing.

I worked on multiple co-op and part-time contracts as a data analyst for the same employer over the past 1.5 years. The team consisted of myself, another co-op student when I was working part-time and the manager, who had been there since last winter (2025). He has a degree in CS from about 15 years ago and his technical skills are SQL, Power BI/Tableau, Excel. His main tasks were to gain requirements from stakeholders and update the ticket planner. One thing I noticed is that he delegated all technical tasks to the students:

1. A large part of the codebase is in pandas, but he never learned it since he said it would be too hard for him to understand code. I tried to encourage him since he knows SQL and transitioning to pandas is not challenging. Even though his CS degree was a long time ago, he would still have that programming background and he mentioned that he already learned harder languages in his degree (e.g. Java, Prolog). However, he always refused and just cared about running the scripts. I also tried to teach him Git, but he did not care. At the end, I was responsible for trying to understand the other student's code and merge everything together.
2. When a co-op student joined the team, he would give them a dashboard and data pipeline to complete. If the co-op student did not finish the task by the end of the term, it would just be given to the next co-op student. If one student finished early and the other student started later, the project would be uncompleted for 2 weeks since he did not work on it.
3. Many tickets on the backlog had not been looked at for months, since myself or the other co-op student were busy with our own tasks and the manager expected the tickets to be only completed by us. Some of the tickets were Power BI dashboard updates I am sure he could do.
4. When migrating data pipelines to Azure, the main IT team was responsible for building the infastructure (e.g. VM, Self-Hosted Integrated Runtime) and the manager said we should just give them all our code so they can deploy it to Azure. Luckily, we still kept ownership and our team needed to build the pipelines to Azure Data Factory with the Python code. The director above my manager asked him to take Azure courses, but he never did. When the project was starting, he said it was a priority for leadership and I asked him what he was doing for it. He just laughed and did some random test contribution and I had to complete the whole project. Although I learned a lot, it did not make sense for a part-time student to build a whole data pipeline in Azure Data Factory and try to learn everything fully myself. When I told the director and manager this, the response was that "rotating between co-op students and giving them projects is what makes the team innovative and you should be glad to have this experience with Azure."
5. The manager gave challenging interviews for co-op students that would be meant for junior, mid-level. During the behavioural interview, the students would be disqualified if they said that they wanted to "learn and improve their technical skills" in the co-op because the manager said "he cannot teach them anything". He also gave students a technical assessment and a take-home project of creating a dashboard and doing an in-person presentation. Even with competitive companies, I have not seen such a long process.

I am not trying to say the manager did not do anything because talking to stakeholders and understanding their requirements is important. He also seems to be a nice guy and praises my work. He believed that doing data pipelines with Python, SQL and Git was revolutionary since he would just use Power BI transformations, which means he would just give the students all the technical work. While I understand he did not have the technical skills, he could have learned them given his background. This would help with business continuity since temporary students would not be responsible for everything.

But, I am not sure if my concerns are valid. Maybe I should not complain since I did learn a lot and some students don't do anything. I am starting a new co-op at a larger organization where there is more structure so I am wondering how I will adjust.