My life experience has taught me that if you want a challenging and rewarding career in tech you have to make some tough choices: * Sacrifice high pay for rewa

My life experience has taught me that if you want a challenging and rewarding career in tech you have to make some tough choices: * Sacrifice high pay for rewarding work. There are lots of places that offer tough challenges for developers interested in doing original work but they, counter intuitively, tend to pay less. Such places are academic research, government (military, alphabet soup), NGOs, charities and so forth. Cutting edge games can be challenging development work but that industry tends to pay less there are so many young people eager to make games. * You could step away from the day to day technical work to focus on strategy and emerging technologies. In the corporate world these people are called principles or senior principles. Your job is to advise management and communicate strategy. This is harder than it sounds because you be spending a lot of time outside of work performing continuing education and aggressively learning new skills that may not materialize into anything useful. * You could look for a job at an early stage startup. The work is likely also challenging and original but expect to sacrifice pay for a tiny slice of equity that may not pan out. This is still technical and higher paying but you will be building anything. * If you really want a rewarding career get into public education as a technology teacher. Be prepared for real world challenges earning less than an entry level developer. > Any advice on how to avoid this CRUD work, which seems to be basically 99% of jobs on the market at the moment? This is largely why I maintain my part time military job. When the corporate world has ground my soul into ashes I can recharge for a year in a foreign nation with more interesting people.