| I've been in this situation a few times and looking back at my career, I could argue I made the "wrong" choices, but they were definitely the "right" choices for me at the time. The way I think about it these days: 1. The space and how exciting it is (AI, Blockchain, etc) 2. My personal growth (learning, but also compensation & rate of career progression) 3. The people (especially who is my direct manager) Ideally, you can get all three in a job! However, when I can't, then every single time, #3 has contributed more towards my job satisfaction than #1 and #2. However, over-indexing on #3 alone is also sub-optimal. Even "boring" spaces often have hard problems and if you dig into the problems, then the work can become intellectually interesting. It may not be sexy or shiny, but you need to decide how much you want to index on that. If you are getting intellectual fulfillment in your day-to-day, better personal growth (including compensation growth), and work with & for good people, then that's a pretty good deal. Don't undervalue doubling your salary. It can provide optionality down the road to work on other things, like folks have said below. Early in my career I worked on what is seemingly boring stuff but the internal engineering problems were surprisingly complex and therefore interesting, even though my "resume bullet" for that stint may appear boring to a reader. Also, the people I worked with were just the nicest and I couldn't imagine leaving that team. I still look back on that period as the happiest time of my professional life, even though I now make many times the compensation and work on some really externally "sexy" stuff. Nostalgia might be playing into that, but I do remember being pretty happy on a day-to-day basis. The counterpoint is that I did eventually leave that team and that company because my career was not moving fast enough and I would not have hit the financial goals I had for my family's wellbeing. |