| Throwing away years of your education (I guess you have some kind of degree) after only 1 year on the first job ... Hmm. Makes one wonder about your maturity and a few other things ... Don't get me wrong, there there is nothing wrong with walking away from a job or career you hate. But given your obvious lack of experience, I would perhaps suggest a different approach. You wrote you like tech, I guess you went into software because you like to write code and solve problems. Then the solution is not to dump your career but to find another job that aligns better with your needs. Just keep in mind that as a junior engineer with no experience (one year really doesn't count as experience yet) you need to keep your expectations realistic and will have to put up with things like asshole/incompetent bosses, unsexy tasks to do, etc. That's the rite of passage at any job/career, you will need to work your way through that. Sadly real life is not what Youtube influencers/millionaires try to make us believe. For a junior engineer, I would strongly suggest looking for work in an established, mid-sized enterprise. Avoid: - Startups. You will be doing literally everything at once because the company doesn't have the resources to hire specialists for the various tasks. Yet you don't have the experience or skill to do this yet. It will be extremely stressful, long hours are the rule plus you have zero job security - you could be unemployed tomorrow because the mistake you (or your boss) made yesterday made the company go bust today. And given the lack of experience the mistakes are inevitable - they are part of the learning process. Don't get lured by a promise of equity - 90% of startups fail and that equity will be worth nothing. - Large corporations. They pay well, you have a reasonable job security - but you will be spending most of your time dealing with the various corporate BS, sitting in endless meetings and not solving any interesting problems most of the time. And as a junior employee you will be likely the first on the line to be thrown under the bus whenever something goes wrong - or at the inevitable next round of layoffs. You are also unlikely to learn much that could help you to advance your career there. Go for a middle-sized business (maybe around 100-200 people). That will be established already, so you won't need to worry whether you will get a paycheck this month or not. At the same time there is not as much BS as in the large companies yet. They are likely to be reasonably agile, the development team is not going to be a huge department and most people are likely on a first name basis. You are also less likely to be stuck with a 30 years old rotting codebase and more likely to be working on something that solves problems the customers need today, not giant projects that take two years only to get approved. Try to learn as much as you can from more experienced people there about how the development processes work, how things should be done (and what to avoid), keep your skills sharp. That is the best way to go about your career in this field, IMO. Certainly not giving up at the literally first obstacle. |