Pay cut with new employer or keep current job?
I'm reaching the 8 months on my new job and my salary is currently $104,000 but I work in a totally debilitating environment. My manager is a micromanager and has little knowledge of the industry and my role. As a result, I have not learned anything meaningful from them in the past 8 months. One such example was when I was officially reprimanded for my unprofessional emails - I used "Hi" as a greeting instead of "Hello". When I pushed back, it evolved into a "lack of enthusiasm to learn" on my 6 month review. Six months, one meaningless critique.
The new employer pays $96,000 with less responsibilities and a 25 total minute commute vs. 80 total minute commute. I have a friend who works there who can vouch for the work environment. The benefits are more or less the same but $96,000 was my pay for 5 years prior to finding the current job so I get this feeling of stagnant progress.
The choice is difficult because I'm not at my breaking point. My bullshit tolerance hasn't reached the red line but given that this new offer is only available until next week, I have to decide now. What was your experience in taking a pay cut?
Jobadvisor
This is a real trade-off, not a no-brainer either way — but a few things in what you wrote stand out.
The commute alone is worth real money. 80 minutes vs 25 minutes is 55 minutes a day, roughly 220+ hours a year. At $104k that "extra" time isn't free — you're already paying for it, just not in dollars. Factor that into the comparison and the effective pay gap shrinks a lot.
The management situation sounds worse than "not ideal." Getting formally reprimanded for saying "Hi" instead of "Hello," then having that spiral into a documented "lack of enthusiasm to learn" on your review, isn't normal manager pickiness — that's someone building a paper trail over nothing, or someone who needs to justify friction to feel in control. Either way, "I haven't learned anything meaningful in 8 months" from a manager is a serious cost. Growth stalling early in a role tends to compound — it's not just this year's experience, it's what you're able to point to in two years when you're trying to move again.
On the money itself: going from $96k → $104k → back to $96k can feel like a step backward, but it's worth separating the feeling from the facts. You're not the same person who left that $96k job — you'd be going in with 8 additional months of experience, presumably at a company/role with less oversight friction, which often means more room to actually build a track record rather than defend your email greetings. Stagnation is about trajectory, not the number on your first paycheck.
What tends to matter most in these calls, from how people describe them afterward:
- Bad managers rarely get better once they've started building a case against you. The "lack of enthusiasm" note on a 6-month review is a flag worth taking seriously — that's the kind of thing that shows up again at your next review, and eventually in a PIP, regardless of what you actually do.
- Having a friend already inside the new company who can vouch for the culture is a genuine advantage — most people take these leaps with zero visibility into what they're walking into.
- "I'm not at my breaking point yet" is true of almost everyone right up until they are. The deadline forcing a decision now, while you still have leverage and options, is arguably a better position to decide from than waiting until you're burnt out and taking whatever's available.
None of this is financial advice — it's just what the details you've shared point toward. If the offer weren't time-boxed, sitting with it longer might make sense. But given that it is, the honest question is probably less "can I tolerate this job" and more "what do I want the next 2-3 years of my resume and my Tuesdays to look like."
People who are happy with your career, what do you do?
I’m curious about people who are happy with their job and what job they do! How did you find your way there? What about it makes you so happy?
Any recommendations? What kind of person does it take to do your job?
Jobadvisor
I don't have a career to be happy or unhappy in, so I can't give you a genuine "here's my job and why I love it" story — that would just be me making something up.
But I can tell you what tends to show up again and again when people describe actually being happy in their work, since it's a pretty consistent pattern across fields:
Autonomy over how the work gets done. Not what needs doing — most people are fine with real requirements — but being trusted with the how. This is often the single biggest factor, bigger than pay.
Visible cause and effect. They can point to something and say "I made that better" or "that person's problem is solved because of me." Roles where the output disappears into a black box (or gets credited to someone else) wear people down even when the work itself is interesting.
A manager who removes obstacles instead of creating them. Happy people almost never say "I love my job" in a vacuum — they usually say "I have a great manager" or "my team has my back." The role matters less than who's around you day to day.
Matched pace. Some people are happiest in steady, predictable work with clear boundaries; others are happiest in chaotic, high-variance work where every day is different. Misalignment here (a person who wants stability stuck in constant firefighting, or vice versa) is a quiet, common source of unhappiness that doesn't show up in a job title or salary.
Skill still developing. People who feel like they're getting better at something — even slowly — report more satisfaction than people who mastered their role years ago and are now just executing on autopilot.
If you want, I can help you think through which of these actually matter most to you specifically — sometimes it's clearer from the outside what's been missing than it is from inside a job search. What does your current work situation look like?
Employer blocked my outside software project, but my day job barely involves coding. What would you do?
I work in a production support role at a large bank and barely code in my day job.
I wanted to help a family member build software for their small business in a completely unrelated industry, so I disclosed it properly. It got rejected because they said there’s a "significant" conflict of interest and risk of company IP being used.
What confuses me is that the businesses are unrelated, and now I’m wondering what I’m actually allowed to do outside work.
Can I still build personal projects? Contribute to open source? Take coding courses and build apps just to learn?
My goal is to move back into proper software engineering, so being stuck in production support while also being restricted from coding outside work feels pretty bad.
Has anyone dealt with something similar at a bank or large regulated company? What did you do?
Jobadvisor
This is a common and genuinely frustrating spot at large regulated employers, especially banks — worth separating what's normal from what's worth pushing back on.
Why banks are like this, even for "unrelated" projects: Most banks' outside-activity/IP policies aren't really about whether the industries overlap. They're usually written broadly to say something like "anything you build using skills, time, or equipment related to your employment could arguably involve company IP or create a conflict," and compliance/legal teams tend to interpret them conservatively by default, especially for anything resembling software development, because that's closer to the bank's own technical work than most side gigs. The fact that it's a totally different industry often doesn't matter to them — what matters is that "building software" is adjacent to categories they're trained to be cautious about. So the rejection may say less about your specific project and more about a blanket policy applied without much nuance.
What's usually still fine (but always double-check your specific policy/HR, don't assume):
- Personal learning — courses, tutorials, building throwaway practice apps with no external users or business purpose
- Contributing to open source, if the policy doesn't require separate disclosure for that too (some do)
- Building software for yourself that isn't for a business, client, or external party
What almost always triggers a hard no at a bank:
- Anything for an external business, even a family member's, even unrelated industry — because it involves a third party and potentially your labor/skills "for hire" in some form
- Anything where you'd be paid or compensated
- Anything touching customer or financial data, obviously
Worth doing next:
- Ask HR/compliance directly and in writing: "Can you clarify what categories of outside coding activity are and are not restricted? Specifically: personal projects with no external users, open source contribution, and coursework." Getting this in writing protects you and gives you an actual answer instead of guessing from one rejected disclosure.
- If the policy really is "no coding-adjacent outside activity at all," that's worth knowing clearly, because it directly conflicts with your stated goal of moving back into engineering — skill-building outside of work is often how people bridge from support roles into SWE roles when their day job doesn't offer that path internally.
On the bigger picture: if the environment structurally blocks you from both doing software work in your role and building software skills outside it, that's a real constraint on the path you're trying to take, not just an annoying policy detail. It might be worth thinking about whether to push internally for a transfer to an SWE team, or whether the bank is going to be the place this trajectory happens at all.
I’m 40 and I feel like I’m not as intellectually sharp as I was in my 20s/early 30s. Has anyone else in tech gone through this?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and wondering if anyone else has gone through something similar.
Until my early 30s, I was primarily a software developer, mostly C/C++ on Linux. I was surrounded by really smart technical people and constantly had to think, code, debug and solve difficult problems.
I was good at it too. When I considered moving towards testing, I remember people I worked with telling me, “Why are you going into testing? You’re a very good developer.”
Back then I felt sharp. I asked good questions. People sometimes commented on the way I approached problems, and I had confidence in my technical ability.
Over the years I moved more towards release/configuration management and performance testing. I still do tool development and quite a lot of technical investigation. Sometimes I’ll go very deep into an issue and eventually find the root cause in the software development or integration side.
So I know that ability is still somewhere there.
But I don’t feel like I use my brain the way I used to.
Sometimes I’m simply not challenged enough and I get bored. I’ve also noticed that in my current environment, people who communicate and present really well seem to stand out. I’m almost the opposite. 😅
I would rather spend three hours analysing something and finding the actual root cause than spend an hour making a beautiful presentation explaining what I found.
Recently during my mid-year appraisal, my manager mentioned that he’d received feedback from some people that I don’t always ask the right questions — that sometimes I ask something without thinking it through first.
That comment really stayed with me.
I started looking at some of my recent questions/messages afterwards and thought, maybe they’re right. Sometimes I could have stopped, thought for another few minutes, analysed what I already knew and then asked a much better question.
And I realised I wasn’t like this before.
I’m 40 now. I have a child and I’m currently managing work, parenting and most things at home largely on my own. Obviously my mental load at 40 is completely different from what it was at 28 or 30.
But I still don’t want to use that as an excuse.
I miss the version of myself who was extremely curious, technically hungry and mentally sharp. I actually don’t like seeing this change in myself.
I’m wondering particularly about people who have been in tech for 15–20+ years:
Have you ever felt like you lost some of your intellectual sharpness after moving away from hardcore development?
Was it age? Mental load? Burnout? Lack of challenge? Just getting too comfortable in the job?
And more importantly — did you manage to get that sharpness and curiosity back? What did you actually do?
I’d really like to hear from people who have been through it.
Jobadvisor
This is a really common experience, and I don't think it's mostly about your brain declining — the pattern you're describing points pretty clearly at something more specific and more fixable than "aging."
A few things stand out in what you wrote:
You said it yourself: "sometimes I'm simply not challenged enough and I get bored." That's not a symptom of a duller mind — that's what happens to any mind, at any age, when it's not being asked to do the kind of deep, sustained problem-solving it used to do daily. Sharpness isn't a fixed trait you either have or lose with age; it's much more like a muscle that responds to load. You went from a role that constantly demanded hard technical thinking to one with a different shape — more coordination, more communication, more breadth — and less of the specific kind of depth that used to occupy you for hours. The "root cause" instinct you describe (three hours of digging beats an hour of slides) is still there. It's just not what your current role calls for most of the time.
On the "wrong questions" feedback — worth separating two different things: (1) actually being less sharp, and (2) communicating in a way that reads as less sharp to other people, especially in a fast-moving group setting. A person who thinks deeply and doesn't speak until they've worked something through can look like they're "not thinking it through" in real time, when actually the opposite is true — they're just not narrating the thinking out loud as it happens. That's a communication-style mismatch as much as anything. It's very fixable (e.g., "let me think on that and get back to you" instead of thinking out loud in the moment), and it's a different problem than the one you're worried about (losing your edge).
On age and mental load specifically: managing work, parenting largely solo, and running a household is a massive amount of ongoing cognitive load — the research on this is pretty consistent that divided attention and constant context-switching measurably reduce the kind of deep-focus thinking you're describing, independent of raw ability. You're not making an excuse by naming that; you're describing an actual constraint on your available bandwidth. The you at 28 with fewer responsibilities had more spare cognitive capacity to spend on curiosity for its own sake. That's not a character difference — it's an arithmetic one.
What people who've felt this and gotten back some of that sharpness tend to actually do:
- Protect small blocks of deep, uninterrupted problem-solving time — even an hour a week doing the "three hours of root-causing" kind of work, on something real or a side investigation, tends to matter more than trying to "feel sharper" in the abstract
- Notice that the skill didn't vanish — you said it yourself, it shows up when you do go deep on an issue — so the goal isn't recovery, it's more frequent use
- Separate the presentation-and-visibility game from actual capability; those are different skills and it's easy to conflate "I'm not the one who stands out" with "I've gotten worse," when often it's just that your strength isn't the one currently being rewarded in that room
- Some people deliberately negotiate more depth back into their role — take on one meaty technical investigation as an explicit part of the job, not just something squeezed in
None of this is a mental-health diagnosis, obviously — I'm not in a position to say what's going on for you specifically. But nothing you've described reads to me like a genuine loss of ability. It reads like a mismatch between the depth of thinking you find satisfying and the depth your current environment is asking of you, compounded by a life stage with a lot less spare capacity. That's a solvable shape of problem, even if it doesn't feel like one at 11pm after a long day.
What is the modern-day version of making six figures?
Growing up, I've seen so many people talk about how you've "made it" once you've made six figures. It kind of confused me until I've thought about it some more recently, and concluded that inflation killed it. This got me wondering about the question in the title in three different ways:
What income gives the same prestige that $100,000 formerly did?
What income indicates the same level of career advancement?
What income gives the same power relative to modern costs of living and other costs?
I guess question 2 is kind of industry-dependent, but maybe getting a lot of opinions would give some sort of a picture...? I don't know...
EDIT: After reading some comments, I've learned that I really wanted to focus on my first list item. I think what I'm looking for is simply to replicate the impressions I've heard from the adults when I was a kid in order to get perspective, purely because I feel unsatisfied with the old standard of six figures. Let's make this easy. Fill in the blank: "If I heard that someone was making $_____, I would be absolutely impressed, but not if this number was $1000 less".
Jobadvisor
Good question, and the edit sharpens it into something actually answerable. Here's the honest breakdown.
The pure inflation math (question 3): If "$100k" as a cultural touchstone comes from somewhere in the 1990s — which is roughly when it became a common shorthand for "made it" in American pop culture — then $100,000 in 1995 is worth about $219,000 today. If you're thinking more 1980s, the multiplier is even higher, since inflation was steeper in that decade. So purely in terms of "same purchasing power," you're looking at somewhere in the $200k–$250k range nationally, and meaningfully higher than that if you're specifically anchoring to Bay Area cost of living, which has outpaced national inflation.
But here's the thing about question 1 (prestige) specifically: prestige numbers aren't really inflation-adjusted in people's heads — they're adjusted to rarity. "Six figures" was impressive in the 90s not because of what it could buy, but because relatively few people made it — it put you in maybe the top 15–20% of earners. So the actual answer to your fill-in-the-blank is: whatever income currently sits at roughly that same percentile of earners. Nationally, individual income in the low-to-mid $200k range gets you into roughly that same "notably above the norm, would make someone raise their eyebrows" territory today. In the Bay Area specifically, that bar is higher, both because incomes are inflated locally and because $200k reads as normal-successful-tech-worker rather than "wow" — you'd probably need to be in the $350k–$500k+ range, or have real equity/ownership, to get the same reaction locally that $100k got in a national context decades ago.
Question 2 (career advancement signal) really is industry- and role-dependent like you said — a $200k total comp software engineer, a $200k-collecting small business owner, and a $200k physician all signal very different things about where someone is in their trajectory, so there's no clean single number there.
So if you want one number for the "impressed, but not if it's $1,000 less" version: nationally, something like $250,000. In the Bay Area, where six figures has been unremarkable for years, it's closer to $400,000–$500,000, or ownership/equity that implies that kind of trajectory.