the preacher in me is saying: you have no idea how good you have it - here I am stuck with ‘high end’ market rate working in corporate IT making probably 1/3 or

the preacher in me is saying: you have no idea how good you have it - here I am stuck with ‘high end’ market rate working in corporate IT making probably 1/3 or even less than high end FAANG salary with mortgage and kids. I have no idea how the heck can you feel bored? Do you have lots of free time at work or involved in repetitive task? if you are, FAANG companies offer avenues for their engineers to contribute to tech projects meant for greater good of the company or even to opensource projects. Now, I got that out of way, to answer your question: - you won’t get FAANG level salary AND perks unless you are a Quant working in wallstreet but then expectations are probably crazy high. One thing that would be a shocker for you is how little influence IT department as whole or Engineers have when it comes to projects to work on and what tech choices to make. Often it is driven by your internal business stakeholders (VPs, Board of Directors, Finance, etc.), and for startups, sure there are unicorn startups out there but a vast majority tends to founded/run by folks who have very little industry experience or a newer trend where a startup (fintech/ai startup) is owned/backed by a forbes 100 corporate giant that really dictates the scope and direction of your projects. But here is the best thing: anytime there is a hot new IT trend (containers, cloud, microservies, devops, Machine Learning, Agile, etc.) - in Corporate IT, unless you are part of corporate giant that sees itself as a tech company, you can bet on two things: innovators have a daunting task of convincing senior IT folks and their business stakeholders that it is worthwhile taking a look at something new and then, there is always that surprise element of: we will just buy a vendor solution and you can just be a fancy application support person.