| Slightly OT but maybe helpful: Don't focus too much on the salary. It's just one tiny part of the whole package. Your dev job pays your rent, food and savings. I assume that most dev jobs do this quite well. Beyond this, the main goal of a job is to increase your future market value, your professional network and to have fun. So. basically it's about how much you are worth in your next job and that you enjoy your time. A high salary doesn't help you if you do stuff which doesn't matter in a few years. A high salary doesn't help you if you work at an unknown company which goes bankrupt in a few months and you cannot show a finished product or that you can stay at one job longer than 12 months. A high salary doesn't help you if your coworkers are toxic or not the smartest guys or their English is on such a basic level that the communication and not the coding is your daily challenge. A high salary doesn't help you if your CTO is a passive-aggressive, clueless guy who doesn't talk. A high salary doesn't help you if you just work on some side projects nobody cares about, in a programming language you weren't hired for. A high salary doesn't help you if you are not happy. |
But after a couple years in the industry? A high salary goes really far. Note that "high" means different things to different people, but choosing a 300k/year job over a 200k/year job is often a good idea, even if it's to do stupid shit and not change the world. That doesn't mean you should choose misery over happiness for money, but it's rare that the choice is that stark.
Most tradeoffs are ill-defined and uncertain when you're choosing the job. Salary, on the other hand, is directly comparable, and it translates to something very real and concrete.