I mean, you need to consider that you have 3 options, not 2: 1 is appealing products, 2 is better comp for more of the same but 3 is keeping status quo. From a

I mean, you need to consider that you have 3 options, not 2: 1 is appealing products, 2 is better comp for more of the same but 3 is keeping status quo. From a purely pragmatic position, you should take the highest paying offer, because if they're similar to your current role, you're currently getting ripped off. As for product fit: AI, blockchain, security are... very different subfields. There's a subtle but important difference between being interested in something vs being interested in the idea of something. Do you know pandas? Do you have experience running a cryptocurrency node? Do you know what are elliptic curves? Being interested in a product means gravitating towards being hands on in them without being prompted. If you're not getting success w/ job applications because you're expecting to get your foot in the door first and expect to be coached on the job, that might not be a viable career path for you in the first place. People who are actually interested in ML study it on their own time. This goes for people in the industry too, not just college kids - I know a number of people w/ a decade+ dev experience taking ML courses and reading up on the literature, and that's only for ML... blockchains have their own literature and so does security, and there's not necessarily a whole lot of overlap. A classical example of being interested in the idea of something is getting into AAA game development and then proceeding to burn out a couple of years later because of the realization that modern AAA game development generally means working on minutiae like a cog in a machine, rather than being involved in a end-to-end creation process. Another variation is thinking you could "pivot", from, say, frontend development in coinbase to more "interesting" work on actual crypto, but due to the gap in relevant experience and lack of go-get-it attitude, that never happens. My advice would be: take the pay increase if the alternative is nothing, and figure out exactly what subfield you want to pivot into and proactively put some work to become desirable in that field.