i come from a very closely knit family and i kinda like it. i am in close proximity to my parents, they are growing old so i do a lot of home chores. meanwhile a lot relatives and dad's business friends live nearby , and the whole area around my home feels like a place of known people. my free time goes with 5-6 friends , who again live nearby, or with gym buddies. this is a nice life, which could further expand with a wife and my kids in future .

at the same time, i have seen the "work" life. my office is in a different state, 90% of people there are people like me who would be renting a home nearby and living alone/with strangers. their main "family"(well pseudo-family) will be their coworkers, and that's also not a bad thing.

in the workplace the reasons to be happy will be a lot (as parties or celebrations will occur on multiple birthdays/ company growths and other achievements) , and so will be the reasons to feel sad ( company failure, teammates leaving, missing family)

at the end of the day , when you are living an office life, you are a corporate rat running for the cheese you are never gonna (or , if you are a glass half full person, let's say that you are a "dedicated work professional giving your 100% to the company")

but here comes the dilemma : with AIs like chat gpt coming around and redefining nthe expectations from a software engineer, you will no longer be expected to be resourceful but rather how much of a corporate rat you can be. ( https://twitter.com/bajicdusko/...)

so 1) is it the only way forward for an upcoming engineer's lifestyle? to be like a soldier for their company , while their family and friends await for their long return? 2) if yes, what is the positi8 aspsct we can take away from this?

PS : what a stupid profession those AI/ML guys work in. they put out their minds together to make a sword which is gonna cut the heads of s/w engineers, their own breed. not lawyers, not doctors, not even the fucking peons, but their own freaking brothers

update : we are at hr round baby!!!

part 1 : https://devrant.com/rants/5528056/...

part 2 (in comments) : https://devrant.com/rants/5550145/...

the tech market is crazy mann! it's one of the top indie fintech companies in our country and has a great valuation.
i totally felt that they i am crashing the interviews , and am seriously not trying to be humble. before the dsa round , i was trying to mug up how insertion sort works 🥲

--------

now my dilemma is should i switch if i get the offer. in a summary:

current company:
- small valuation but profitable (haven't picked funding for last 3 years , so poast valuation is some double digit million $, but can easily be a unicorn company)
- very major b2b player in my country. almost all unicorns (including this fintech company) and some major MNCs are their client and they have recently acquired a few other companies of us and eu too, making them- a decent global player

- meh work : i love being a cutting edge performer in android but here we make sdks that need to support even legacy banking apps. so tech stack is a lot of verbose java and daily routine includes making very minor changes to actual code and more towards adding tests , maintaining wrapper sdks in react/cordova/unity etc, checking client side code etc.

- awesome work life balance : since work is shit and i am fast enough, i am usually working only 2-4 hours a day. i joined gym, got into shape , and have already vsited 5 places in last 6 months, and i am a guy who didn't used to have time even on sundays. here, we get mote paid leaves than what i would usually need.

- learning opportunities: not exactly from the company codebase, but they provide unlimited access to various course learning platforms like linkedin learning, udemy and others, so i joined some web dev baches and i now know decent frontend too. plus those hybrid sdks also give a light context to new things

new company :
- positives : multi billion valuation, one of the top players in fintech , have been mostly profitable ( except a few quarters)
- positive : b2c so its (hopefully) going to put me back into racing shoes with kotlin, jetpack and latest libraries.
- more $$$ for your boy :)

- negetive : they seem to be on hiring spree and am afraid to junp ship after seeing the recent coinbase layoffs. fintech is scary these days

- negetive : if they are hiring people like me, then then they are probably hiring people worse than me 😂. although thats not my concern what my main concer is how they interviewed. they have hired a 3rd party company that takes interviews of people FOR THEM! i find that extremely impolite, like they don't even wanna spare their devs to hire people they are gonna work with. i find this a toxic, robotic culture and if these are the people in there then i would have a terrible time finding some buddy engineer or some helpful senior.

- negetive : most probably a bad wlb : i worked for an year for a fast paced b2c edtech startup. no matter how old these are , b2c are always shipping new stuff and are therefore hectic. i don't like the boredom here but i would miss the free time to workout :(

so ... any thoughts about it?