[lightning19]

Where I live DS pays much more for the same experience the SWE so maybe I am a bit biased on the money side too. But I get you on the models not working thing, I've been there before. Thankfully it was personal projects and not for work. Cranking out CRUD apps does give you some sort of satisfaction I guess although I sorely miss doing math because my background is in engineering. If you have to do algo tests I guess you're in the USA? I've interviewed with companies in EU and Africa and everytime it was just a take home test building something according to spec using specified languages and frameworks. It's not that hard to do. I'm actually doing one right now for a senior dev golang job although I never wrote more than 1k lines of code in golang before lol