3 ms·

I'm a non profit guy and love it. I don't get so worked up about the mission, I've been doing this sort of thing in various roles for years and am pretty jaded,

I'm a non profit guy and love it. I don't get so worked up about the mission, I've been doing this sort of thing in various roles for years and am pretty jaded, but the work is magnificent. I'm a pretty junior, inexperienced dev, having retrained a few years back, but I get to play with all the things. Stuff I wouldn't be let near at a large Corp. I find my work very diverse, engaging, and as the go to guy for most things technology, I get a tonne of respect. I guess it depends where you live and what your commitments are, but a six figure salary is still huge for most people. If you can cope with the pay cut, why not take the plunge? Worst case scenario, it doesn't pan out: you've still got a FAANG on your CV, and it's a completely acceptable narrative when looking somewhere big again to say you wanted to do something meaningful for a while.

blaser-waffle 5y ago
How'd you do the retraining?
- specproc 5y ago
  Not a normal route. I took a masters degree in public policy at a quant heavy school. I'd coded a lot as a kid, but hadn't done anything beyond VBA since then. Picked up python, and an understanding of stats, network analysis and NLP, loved it. Next job was a small think tank, I did a study or two with the skills I picked up. Applied for a data engineer job on the back of that a few years later and here I am. My in was ticking enough of the tech skills whilst having a load of domain knowledge.