u/internetcookiez

TLDR: 2 years into my career, making $80k base + $15k bonus at a tech company I genuinely love. Great perks, hybrid work, 10-4 hours, 5 min commute, solid team of 5 devs. Got an offer for $117k base + 20% bonus (roughly 40% more TC) at a finance company doing AI automation work, but I'd be the sole developer reporting directly to upper management with no real team around me and a grind culture. Turned it down because I'm early career and want seniors to learn from, but now second-guessing myself. Was that the right call?

I'm currently living in a medium-cost-of-living area and I graduated about two years ago and landed my first full-time job. The average salary around my area is around $80,000 because I'm in Canada so the salaries aren't that great. However the current job I'm at pays me 80k base and roughly 15k in annual bonus, sometimes slightly less sometimes more.

I currently love my job. They have a gym, they have great food catered to us, they have massage therapists on site, they have a hybrid work policy, and the work-life balance is really great. I get to work from 10 am to 4 pm and that's totally acceptable and fine. It's also very commutable. It's only five minutes away from my current apartment and I actually just love it.

I work in a team of five. We are all developers that leverage our skill sets and work together as a team in an Agile environment and everything just seems absolutely great.

However I did get another job offer from another company and the job offer is $117,000 base salary with a potential of 20% bonus on top of that. The current devs in adjacent teams at this company said that the bonus is doable and not some unattainable number, and often times exceeding it is expected and not too difficult. I asked around about the work culture and I even asked directly the people that were recruiting me. The work culture was summarised in one word and that is meritocracy. You work hard and you reap the rewards. However as a result there is no necessary emphasis on culture and well-being as much as it would be in my current company. If you can do the work and you do it really well, you get a lot of money. That's pretty much the job. There is no big gym on site and there are no catered lunches by chefs. It's just a really straightforward job that lets you earn a lot of money. Its an AI focused role, where as a dev I would automate things in the company by creating agents and workflows.

The only issue I found with that is the work-life balance would be a little bit more hectic as I would be the only developer on the product and I would be reporting to upper management. It's a finance company this time and not a tech company.

What I found worrisome is that since I'm early in my career I just do not find it comfortable enough to dive deep into an ownership role where I'm the only developer that's handling everything. They allow me to use AI and encourage me to use AI in the job application process as well as in the interviews. They told me that I am free to use AI in the job as long as it gets me to the final result. They essentially are a finance company that acquires other companies and makes their products in-house better to increase ROI.

Am I crazy for declining that job offer? The reason I declined is because my justification is that I'm early in my career and I do want seniors around me to learn from, but the pay bump seems really nice. I don't know. Can someone shed light on this?

I had an unusual vantage point. I spent three years grinding through university assignments the hard way, Stack Overflow, rubber duck debugging, suffering through broken code at 2am, then ChatGPT dropped in my final year. It wasn't good enough to lean on for fourth-year problems so I didn't bother. I graduated, landed my first full-time role, and by then AI had gotten good enough that I could delegate junior-level tasks to it as long as I understood the architecture and best practices well enough to supervise the output and prompt well.

That foundation matters more than I realized at the time.

Fast forward to now. I've been talking to the co-op students in my office about how AI is actually being used on their campus in 2026. The answer is everywhere. Assignments, projects, everything. The work is generated by AI, submitted to professors, and in many cases evaluated by AI. The feedback loop that used to produce learning, writing broken code, not knowing why, digging until you finally understood, is largely gone.

Here's my uncomfortable take: I think roughly 70% of current CS graduates are going to struggle badly in real-world engineering roles. Not because they're lazy or stupid, but because they never built the mental models that come from actually failing at hard problems. They brute-force memorized theory for exams and forgot it a week later. They never had to truly understand why something worked because the AI just made it work.

And this is where it gets interesting. I don't think AI is going to take engineering jobs so much as it's going to expose a massive quality gap in who's filling them. Senior engineers who built their intuition before AI are gradually going to exit the industry. Not because they're automated out, but because the craft they loved is disappearing. The people behind them largely can't architect solid systems from first principles. That gap has to be filled by someone. The people who win in this environment are a narrow slice: those who went through the trenches early enough to build genuine intuition and also embraced AI as a multiplier rather than a substitute for thinking. That cohort is small and universities are not replenishing it. We aren't seeing it yet, but we will. You cant have a bunch of agents doing work and not understand atleast why its doing something. Even the basics of how to run a unit test via a command line is lost knowledge to the next cohort.

The counterargument I keep hearing is that every generation said the same thing about calculators, Google, IDEs. Maybe. But those tools assisted thinking. What I'm describing is a tool that replaces the thinking that was supposed to happen during the learning phase itself. A calculator didn't stop you from understanding math, it just saved time on arithmetic. AI skips the part where you learn to actually think like an engineer.

Curious if others are seeing this on the ground, or if I'm just falling into the classic "things were harder in my day" trap.