Will taking a job in one sector set my career path

Hey I’ve been pretty luck last week and I managed to get 2 job offers.

One is a good gig at a massive, old school financial group. I’m talking I have to wear a suit and tie. My biggest worry though is the tech is old and my coworkers and higher ups don’t seem bleeding edge so I doubt I’ll be flexing my developer muscles. Plus they have a volleyball intramural league

The other company is contracted for 6 months with a really cool tech IoT company. Job through Insight Global, Full remote, Has amazing Glassdoor reviews, cool projects, I crushed their technical interview so I feel like I can actually contribute.

I’m leaning towards the financial group because money matters and I want to feel secure.

What I’m worried about is after 2 years I’ll be 27 and I’m scared that working as a SWE for a financial group won’t look as good so I’ll never be able to work on a project that I’m passionate about again

Any advice?

  • shastaxc
    3•1 year ago

    First job? Go with the financial firm, get 1-2 years of experience then leave. If you already had experience, I would say neither job is good. But getting your foot in the door is difficult. Most of your technical skills you pick up might not be transferable since it’s old tech like you mentioned but you should still get very valuable experience that you don’t have from school like working with version control strategies, release cycles, test/staging/production builds, writing tickets, prioritization, etc.

    Some old tech is not as irrelevant as you may think too. If they have anything on Java, try to do that. It’s still widely used. But cobol, fortran, ada, php, that sort of thing… Those are dead or dying. You may not get the choice but you can at least state your preference and hope for the best.