I am also an experienced software engineer. And I am aware of how unusual my situation is if you take the first paragraph into consideration.

Originally I graduated with a non-STEM degree but my interests pivoted into software development late in college so I started just hitting up Craigslist to apply to jobs seeking SWE's. That is how I got my start in doing this as a job. I later took a contract-to-hire job soon after graduating. After the contract period was over, though, they wanted me to keep working for them, but just as a contractor. I was taken for a ride. Now it feels like I got stuck on a bad vibe and to this day I continue riding it out.

Fast forward about a decade. Almost as if by accident, without thinking about it, my "career" has been just working for cheaper clients on low-ball contracts and spending half of my time unemployed and looking for work. So I never had a "normal" salaried CS job.

There must be something that is filtering me out of getting offers for the "normal" jobs and I need others' help in figuring out why I can't interview well enough to get past that filter.

So naturally, I feel like a fraud. I have probably never been on the same playing field as programmers that do maintain job security with full-time jobs.

Clients keep telling me I do great work. But they don't want to re-engage for future work nor do they refer more work to me. Something feels off.

After what feels like I've just been noodling around not really feeling like I've carried myself as an average adult most of these years, what do you think I should be doing? Aside from doing-over my professional life with a the right college education, what else would you suggest?

I've to take a decision about joining a company as an FTE (SDE).

## The Options

- I interned at a fairly large corporation last summer and received an offer to join as an FTE after I graduate. My experience there was really not worth my time. Everything had friction. There was not enough work and every effort felt futile. Although, the compensation for the FTE role was decent and I soft-accepted the offer as a "backup".

- I've been interning at an alpha-product startup for around 4 months. I had a talk with their CEO today about possibility of joining as an FTE. I've really enjoyed working at this company. I have felt my skillset grow and the team is one of the bests I've worked with. They offered me a full-time position as well after I graduate. The catch is - the compensation is fairly less than what the aforementioned corporate is providing.

The startup team has already led a product from initiation to tremendous growth in the last few years and are focused on building their 2nd product. The company is really people-first and has a really growth-enabling environment. Since I am an early-stage member, I'll be granted equity as well if I join.

- One more choice is to keep looking for other jobs until I get something that's ideal.

Hope HN can help with the decision or at least provide me some points that I should keep in mind. Happy to provide more context if required.

## Extra context on compensation

- Being from this institution, I've seen people get decent packages without doing anything just by grinding Leetcode questions. I'm not a fan of how the system works but that's a different topic. You can tell it's an ego issue. I've worked my ass off in college - handling internships and coursework simultaneously. Graduating with a salary lower than the average student here doesn't feel right.

- The other thing is societal pressure. Turning down the previous offer in favor of the latter would not something my family or even some of the students here would understand as they think objectively in terms of monetary compensation.

----

Who doesn't want a better salary? But is it something I should focus on in my first full time job?

I'm Kevin, co-founder of Pathrise (https://www.pathrise.com). Pathrise is an online replacement for career services that helps students get better jobs and make more money. If and only if they get hired during our program, students pay us back a tuition fee of 7% of their income for 1 year.

For more context, you can read about us here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/09/pathrise-wants-to-be-the-....

The problem: universities aren't directly incentivized to get students good jobs since they make all their money in upfront tuition. As a result, college career services centers aren't results-driven and can't properly support their students. Most students are essentially left to figure things out on their own, and they think to themselves, career services are useless. The easiest way to verify this is to ask your average student how many times they've visited their career services center in the last year.

In reality, career services (that actually work) are probably one of the highest value things a student can receive. You can take any step of the job search (e.g. online applications), train students on one technique (e.g. lead gen and cold emailing), and produce significant and measurable returns (e.g. we've measured that this technique in particular can 4X response rate from under 5% to over 20%). Pathrise does this with every step of the job-hunting process, from training students from a 2/6 to a 5/6 in technical interviewing scores based on real company rubrics to helping students get a 10%+ higher salary through negotiation.

In this sense, we're kind of like YC for students instead of startups. Founders give 7% equity to YC because they know YC will increase their company's prospects by more than 7%. Students give us 7% of their first year's income, and our program is designed to increase their job prospects by more than 7%. They know we'll do everything in our power to provide them that value because we have aligned incentives - we only make money if they do.

What this ends up looking like is an online accelerator for students that takes place in 12 monthly batches a year, followed by an average of 3-4 months of support until a student is placed. Instead of focusing on a technical education (like our friends at Lambda School), Pathrise is entirely about optimizing your job search. This involves services like resume review, prospecting, referrals, interview preparation, and negotiation advice. Again, unlike career services today, we track every data point so we can hold ourselves accountable to actually produce significant and measurable value for our students.

Thanks for reading! I'd be happy to answer any of your questions and would greatly appreciate your feedback.

I think it would give opportunities to those who are less traditionally qualified and have an additional benefit of adding a seed of doubt to many highly qualified first years that maybe they had gotten randomly rather than "earning" their spot.

It would also acknowledge the fact that places like ivy league schools get as much as 20% of qualified applicants but accept much fewer than that, making admission, for many, essentially a lottery, rather than something they've earned.