u/gobluedev

Extremely stuck on an offer for the fact I’m fully remote.

Senior Software Engineer
5 YOE

The Trade Desk
Base: ~200k
RSUs: 500k over 4 years
Great medical, dental, vision benefits
Much better for career growth
Great team
VHCOL area
3 days in office hybrid

Booz Allen Hamilton (current position)
Base: 200k (sounds like they’d be willing to offer a raise)
Okayish benefits
Fully remote (huge!)
Bouncing from contract to contract
Struggling team looking to rebuild
Great domain I currently work in
Get to maintain active TS/SCI
MCOL - Not great schools, crime (ABQ)

For those who have been on possibly dying teams and/or failed projects what were the biggest indicators you noticed?

Current team leadership is trying to recruit me to stay. I put our survival at 5-10%. I’m just trying to gauge if that 5-10% is correct and be able to judge not riding the ship down.

Were you ever in a position like this and stuck it out only to watch the team beat the odds? What did it take?

Completed the OA today and have meeting with recruiter next week. This is for a cleared position. Not trying to get ahead of myself but I have some questions to make sure I’m prepped.

1. In a cleared SDE role, how much true coding will I continue doing? I’m fully remote now and spend most of my day actually writing software so I’d like to at least maintain doing that.

2. What TC (base, rsus, bonus) should i be thinking about? I honestly have no idea in this space. 5 YOE as mid-level to senior dev, 12 years military fighter pilot, TS/SCI and Q clearance holder, BS/MS in CS. I make $180k fully remote at my current company. This position is in Denver.

Appreciate all the help!

Full-stack software dev with ~5 YOE on paper but credited with 12 YOE for salary/benefits at a large F500.

Prior military with a TS/SCI which leads to the difference in 5 vs 12 YOE. Currently in a mid-level role but fulfilling the duties of a senior, lead, and SME.

I’ve been with this company about 2 years and in that time we’ve gone from 6 devs down to 3 (looking to hire another). We’ve only had 1x 6-month contract with “plenty on the horizon.”

The issue I’m struggling with is that I feel like my team way overengineered the heck out of our product and it’s made it very difficult to change. We’re moving to K8s, AWS, etc yet last month we had to scale down to single instances of our servers due to bugs being present when things were scaled up. The architecture is overly extensible to the point that none of the 3 remaining devs has any idea what’s going on (several levels of nested CBs in workers.., workers only ever use other workers via events, etc).

The biggest issue I have is the team is so resistant to change/fixing this stuff. The team lead acknowledges we have issues but never lets us move towards fixing them after we provide justification and a plan.

I’m fully remote making 180k so I’ve got a pretty good setup. I’m just wondering if I’m hindering my career growth and it’s time to move on.

Edit:

The biggest thing to me is the team has had 2x 6-month contracts in their 5 years of being around.

We’ve gone from 8 to 3 devs. One of the original devs who wrote the framework/designed the architecture refuses to come back.

Every year we’ve been on the chopping block and the budget keeps getting reduced.

To me those are the worrisome signs.