[Justen]

I made this jump about a year ago. I was a DoD contractor out of college for 4 years, but I knew after ~2yrs that there weren't going to be any fun challenges. The closest you'd get would be prepping for the demo days to present to the higher-ups.

I started working with the MEAN stack to offset the boredom and after about 15 months I switched to a local startup. The pay was about 30% less, but I didn't have any professional experience on my resume (just my side project) so I saw it as more of a stepping stone. After ~6 months there, I applied to remote positions and ended up finding an awesome Senior level front end gig making quite a bit more compared to my DoD job. Also, I'm way happier now that I get to work with the cool things I used on my side projects. If our situations are as similar as I think, I'd say float your resume out there and see what bites. GL!

[scrapcode]

Would you mind if I shot you an e-mail? It sounds like you took the exact jump that I worry about taking, and it'd be great to ask you a few questions.

[Justen]

Sure, my email is in my profile