Before I talk about software development, let me talk to you about a different field: medicine.

Most doctors will tell you not to go into medicine for the money. Yes, physician salaries are very high, and you can make even more by specializing. The problem is that medical training is very hard: four years of med school, three years of residency. Just wanting a big salary is not gonna motivate you to make it all the way through unless you’re a brass-balls executive type. You won’t make it through seven years of medical training because you “want a piece of that”. You have to genuinely want to be a doctor, not just have a doctor’s salary.

Software development is a bit similar. People see the high salary, the ability to work from home and stop at 3pm when you feel like it. They see the prestige and the respect, how people assume you must be intelligent because of what you do. And they “want a piece of that”, so they go to a bootcamp or get a comp sci degree. Then they realize they were never cut out for this, and they fold and go into sales. They weren’t cut out for it because:

1. Writing and debugging software can be agonizingly frustrating
2. Everything is constantly changing

The first one requires a natural bent toward detail orientation; if nobody has ever criticized you for being pedantic, you probably don’t belong in software development.

The second one is what knocks out a lot of the straight-laced people who would have done better as lawyers or civil engineers. Nothing is ever stable in software development, which means you can’t really succeed in this field unless you thrive on chaos. Are you more comfortable with a constrained problem space? Do you like to check boxes? Are you bad at improvising? Then software is not for you.

Here’s the problem: those two traits I outlined above? It’s very rare to find them in the same person. There are plenty of nitpicking, detail-oriented people; lots of them are accountants and inspectors. And there are plenty of people who thrive on chaos; lots of them are car salesmen and surfing instructors. But finding someone who is obsessively detailed oriented and loves chaos? Those people are rare. Combine that with the fact that you need to be at least one sigma (preferably two) above average IQ-wise, and you’re looking at a very small labor pool.

I’m in software because I tried it and I liked it.

(Not gonna lie, though. The money helps.)

I get paid to solve problems by dealing with abstract ideas.

As a job, this combines everything I like about philosophy and mathematics. Additionally, I can honestly say that I have a better apprehension over abstractions than do most philosophers, because most of them cannot turn their ideas into running code.

In the words of Linus Torvalds, “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

I cannot overstate how great it is to solve problems with code.

Right now, I’m solving a few different problems:

• A problem regarding timing, where the solution is limited by the speed of light.
• A problem regarding task scheduling which, though it should be a solved problem by now, isn’t, because people and systems change over time.
• A problem regarding artifact versioning which results in
• playing social games to minimize the sizes of sets that are involved in a Cartesian product, and
• playing technical games to come up with the fastest route to fix a whole list of problems.

All of this is immensely fun and I can see real life being impacted by the code I write.

Footnotes

Conditions for a new job ?

Relevant for society in general. Something that brings benefits for all things living on this earth.

Well within the boundaries of the law everywhere. Not an activity making use of loopholes in the law or on the boundaries of legality.

Socially acceptable. A job you can talk about with friends and family without getting in trouble of any kind.

A job that allows me to be with my partner and my children, not too far away from the rest of my family.

A job that entails having contact with other people, peers, people who are happy to use my services.

A job that allows me to use, and grow, my skill set.

And a salary that allows me to live a “normal” life, nothing too fancy. I don’t need a muscle car, a large mansion, a cabin in the mountains or by the seaside, or a €100K watch.

Let me guess. You don’t have an intriguing opportunity with that list of requirements.

The company not coming across like douches who use buzz words in place of substance.

Or an absence of red flags like:

• “Fast paced, dynamic deadlines and shifting priorities” - A.K.A. abysmal management.
• “Cross functional and multidisciplinary” - A.K.A. “humans work here and we think that’s impressive”
• “Competitive environment” - A.K.A. you’ll hate everyone and everyone will hate you.
• “Advanced techniques such as [insert something trivial]” - A.K.A. boredom will consume your soul.
• “Entry level. 3 years experience minimum” - A.K.A. a company run by people who don’t understand words and/or numbers.
• “From top universities” - A.K.A. “We ride on our laurels a lot here; it’s how we roll.”
• No indication of remuneration - A.K.A. “the first thing we want to do is screw you in negotiations because we value our employees like that. “

Some things that’d get me excited:

• Dogs welcome.
• A nice location that isn’t San Fran or New York.
• Interesting problems to work on.
• Time reserved for research and testing ideas.
• A clear and succinct description of the position that isn’t loaded with meaningless buzzwords.
• A good description of the immediate work environment.

The first thing that gets me excited (actually that simply doesn’t turn me off) is if the recruiter speaks English with minimal accent, and is using a telephone with decent voice quality. I have no problem with recent arrivals in the United States. What I don’t care for is when I simply cannot understand what they’re saying. How can you hold a halfway technical conversation when you can’t even determine the subject of the call without having them repeat two or three times?

The second thing that gets me excited is if the recruiter demonstrates that he has actually read my resume. Now, I’ve already discarded the email offers of android jobs and PHP jobs and javascript jobs, so he has to do more than say, “I have this C++ job.” If the recruiter has actually read my resume, I know there is some slight hope that the conversation is going somewhere.

The third thing that gets me interested is location. See, I’m walking distance from Amazon’s massive headquarters in Seattle’s South Lake Union district. I’m close to downtown and Pioneer Square (where all the startups are). I’m further away from Bellevue and Redmond, but Microsoft has arranged truly rockin’ bus service, so if they’re close to Microsoft, Redmond is OK, but if not, it can be quite a slog to get out there.

“Startup” and “equity” are actually quite a turn-off for me. I’ve chased the startup dream twice, and got nothing for it.

I like to hear salary range, but recruiters never give that info up front. Recruiters work on commission. If the job is a contract, they may have a deal that the total cost to the employer should be $X/hour. So if I make less, the recruiter makes more. You can almost always squeeze an extra $5/hr out of these contracts just by balking at the rate.

Everything else is hearsay. The recruiter doesn’t know, in fact, if the team is good or dysfunctional. They don’t even understand the technical details. I just put up with them long enough to get a phone screen, where I can start forming an opinion of the opportunity.

A good culture.

Less bros. It matters that there are women in their team and management. Big plus if the founder is a woman.

The biggest Asian tech companies that reached out recently are actually founded by women. The company valuation of over $1B probably matters too. I don’t have great experiences with struggling startups so proud of their $20M VC funding.

Efficiency and less bureaucracy.

Engineering has standards and processes. If they can’t afford to hire more competent QA’s and make Engineers wait for weeks, they are not agile. I have seen people leave because of a mismatch of people, process and expectations. The American companies I worked for were more efficient. Processes are important, and having a standard and how long it would take to test work is incredibly important.

Here’s what gets me excited, when talking to a recruiter:

1. “Your friend [X] suggested that this position might be something you’d like” (I will be verifying this with my friend [X])
2. A difficult problem with ongoing difficulty going forward (I like a challenge)
3. A problem no one has solved before (If you are calling me to work on your Facebook++, I’m not interested)
4. Open Source, preferably BSD licensed (I would like to be able to use the code in the future, if I go to a different company; I hate solving any problem more than once; if you understand the difference between “tactical” and “strategic”, you’ll be happy to offload the maintenance of your “tactical” code to an open source community to save money anyway; yes, the “secret sauce” stays secret)
5. “We don’t use Scrum” (there are other aspects of Agile methodology that are distasteful, but that one is worst)
6. “We don’t have open plan offices” (many high end engineers are on the autism spectrum, usually Aspergers; they suffer from a condition known as “continuous partial attention”, and it kills their ability to concentrate; for me headphones aren’t an answer, because I process code in the same part of my brain that I process music; I know others with the same issue)
7. “We are willing to negotiate an initial vacation balance” (if you are hiring me away from somewhere, I’m going to lose my accumulated vacation, which is usually maxed out anyway)
8. “We offer elder care insurance, in case your parents become incapacitated” (this is really, really important for millennials; they just don’t know it … yet)
9. “The job will have you working in [one of my pet areas]…” (I have enough that you should be able to tell me some, and hit one or two of them … especially if [X] actually did send you to me)
10. “Here’s a 10,000 foot view of what we’d like you to work on for us…” (yes, I know this is wishful thinking without an NDA, but the recruiter better know so they know they are talking to the right person

That’s my top ten list, not in any specific value order.

It depends on your definition of "far away" and "pays well" as well as your personal circumstances.

If it is far away from where you live but not far enough to justify moving (other side of a city vs. other side of the country) the extra money could be eaten by the extra commuting costs and possibly childcare. In which case, you could be better of staying where you are.

If it is far enough to justify moving, is the cost of living in the new location higher, lower or the same as where you are at the moment?
If it is lower or the same, you will be better off. If it is higher, you will need to work out whether the higher pay will be consumed by the higher cost of living. If it is too high, you will be worse off than staying where you are.

The other consideration is the work itself.
Is it likely to lead to further promotions and further pay increases?

I'm a fresh-out-of-college gal, and I've chosen an unpaid internship with awesome work and some amazing career opportunities. Though, a big part of the decision to go this route instead of hunting for a job that pays well, is that I've long attached to a fresh-out-of-college guy who scored a government job that pays well, who's willing to support and cover me for the short term.

At all possible, I recommend choosing a job with awesome work. It will bring much more job satisfaction than the higher pay of other, less awesome jobs, and prepare you in experience and portfolio meat (when applicable) so you'd be first-pick for better paying, more awesome jobs.

By the way, that unpaid internship? Since I've been treating the work as a job that pays well, the company loves me, and wants to do what they can to keep me as a paid employee after the internship term. Good work pays off.

This may seem snarky but I assure you I am absolutely serious…

Just provide above-market-rate value to your current or different employer.

It's actually quite simple. Be very good at what you do, so much so that it's obvious to others. For example: If you're a sales rep who has a proven history of being a top 10% performer, hitting your numbers every time and providing millions of dollars in revenue to your employers, who cares about market rate? I want you on my team and I'll pay a premium for you if I'm confident that you'll deliver.

The biggest leaps of pay always occur when you jump ship to another employer. While you may see people experience 20%-50% (sometimes more if you're lucky) increases in pay strategically moving jobs, you'll never see that happen by staying with the same employer. It just doesn't occur. They are much less likely to pay significantly more to retain you compared to a company who has a huge need that you will fill. But clearly there is a limit to the “bouncing” jobs you can and should do. You also don't want to look like a flight risk for a potential employer. No more than one job every two years on average is a good rule of thumb. If you've moved more often than that, it better be that people are giving you unreal opportunities you can't pass up and it better be obvious that's the case by looking at your resume.

Good luck! Comment with any thoughts!

As software developer, being an experienced employee I certainly look for my career growth by using new technologies which helps me in upskilling myself with the latest updated framework and technology. At the same time in any company a employee will certainly look for work life balance inorder to maintain a thin line between your professional and personal life.

But if you are a fresher, you must go for any company that gives you more work experience skills in IT , and to know methodologies and get good experience on corporate world. As a fresher it is certainly learning should be the key thing which you should focus on for which any start ups will really add lot of values as you will be able to handle the stressful situations.

I think it depends on the experience level required. If it's a more senior role, then the overqualified person probably has an advantage. If it's more of a junior role, then the underqualified person has an advantage.

But there are too many variables to worry about. Just do your best to have your resume in the best shape it can be.

• Quantify or qualify resume statements to allow the reader to visualize your previous environments.
• Provide a summary at the top of your resume (after contact) that summarizes your career, skills, and achievements (4–8 short, concise bullets)
• Give each job a one—to two-sentence blurb that helps provide scope for your work environment and your work tasks.
• Don't list tasks unless you can quantify or qualify them (most people just list tasks, and I can't tell which is better than the other).

Good luck!

So Would have been great if you have mentioned names of startups or would have mentioned the business model of each of them as lot of things depend on it .
So from present information i would suggest the 2nd one is much better .

Reason :
1) you will learn lot of things .
2) You will build lot of things by your own .
3) You will be earning more .
4) Great that you will have undiluted equity but do ensure its common share or preferred share .
5) Even if the business fails or shutdown , you will have lots or badges on your shoulder and you can market yourself very well and can attain better position quickly in another organisation.

It appears that you are super talented and young and not having worked in many companies before the first start up which is now in its second phase or perhaps fully established. The choice of remaining or working again in a start up is brilliant because it is tough to equal the learning in a start up. However there is a different and huge learning for the future which is also in a scale up. The choice is not linear in monetary terms as both may seem okay. However likely the .004% of stocks will be or are worth far more than revenue share in the other. Since most youngsters and startups are in IT. The choice should rest on what stage you are at vis a vis the job offer and the stage of the two companies? The current job with a company that is well funded should in no way mean that the job is now routine or mundane because funding also means scaling and that experience is very different to just starting up and just providing proof of concept of an idea. Less than 1% get funded and survive anyway. Does the existing company function also offer challenges and more important is the management culture and style? Your current employer seems to recognize your value and talent and so there is some sort of environment synergy. Though buried in the subconscious, it is important to know that only 33% of job satisfaction is actually credited to remuneration. 33% comes from work environment where the learning is always endorsed by execution, implementation and the balance from peer recognition. So working with existing guys if they are move to the "next level" then that will be a new learning. Evaluate the new start up on at least have funding to last out a reasonable gestation which is almost inevitable. In this very crazy age of mysterious valuation where there seem to be a breed of investors who suddenly decide on the current flavour and then have methods to value a company from a billion to ten in one year, has only one downside. Despite proof in cognitive research, business research rarely recognises that the ideal environment for innovation and great ideation is constraint. A boot strapped start up is by design the best environment for innovative ideation, but business then needs to move on to execution and scaling once funds are there to take ahead a good idea. Constraint based design thinking is unfortunately rarely included after big funding is available, because constraint is erroneously considered to be a compulsive environment created when there is scarcity of financial resources. Your decision should be made based on continuing to satisfy your personal challenge and the matching of management culture within the two companies.