Nothing wrong with being a mercenary and I agree with the value prop differences by age/life stage.
I think working in a non-spaghetti codebase makes a huge difference, work enjoyment-wise - regardless of age. And that can be more valuable than people think.
My first job out of school was an amazing model of how to run a company and had been around for years. I have also worked at startups who had immediately created a big ball of string within 3 years. The company with by far the smartest people had to run a nightly job to "recalculate everything" that took 10 hours because their logic was too complex to be reliably deterministic.
If I just wanted a fat paycheck I would have gone into finance or fintech, it's far simpler. I don't intend to discount other people's or company's choices, but I do think "leetcode as a default" is a terrible model for finding decent engineers, and even worse now we have LLMs.
> but I do think "leetcode as a default" is a terrible model for finding decent engineers, and even worse now we have LLMs.
I don’t disagree. It’s a gravity problem. I might not like gravity. But gravity doesn’t care if I like it or not if I jump off of a 25 story building. It’s a small investment in time to have a much better career trajectory.
Let me emphasize I wouldn’t do it. But I don’t have to. I’ve done the build the big house in the burbs things twice and now downsized. My (step)children are grown and fully launched. I have credentials an experience where two of the other BigTech cloud providers (I have worked at one) were recruiting me based on my network without grinding leetcode. But most people don’t have those choices at least at 25-26.
I definitely couldn’t advise someone who was a recent grad to meander in enterprise Dev because they didn’t want to play the game. Yes I realize a large majority of developers in the US are enterprise devs. If you take away my AWS account, I’m just an enterprise dev with above average communication skills.