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Having worked at both, the latter type of company also has it's downsides. Primarily: a) the inverse is also true...you'll be working on some old technology tha

Having worked at both, the latter type of company also has it's downsides. Primarily: a) the inverse is also true...you'll be working on some old technology that only your industry utilizes and isn't well optimized for modern use cases or is extremely niche; despite there being plentiful use cases to make the switch, it'll never be "in the budget", b) your payrate is generally going to be quite a bit lower than industry standards at app/tech companies and c) you won't get the same treatment as an engineering focused company. The latter two are very much variable by company, but those are the general trends. They'll also vary in importance to different people. The former item, however, can be just as burn-out/tedium prone as tech company stack whiplash.

noduerme 3y ago
Maintaining old systems and not getting the chance to exercise your hottest take on how they should be rebuilt is often tedious as hell. But I find a lot of comfort in it. I usually find that the future road maps that stick in my head for a year or more are the ones worth a 10-year overhaul, and I like to be able to tell clients that when enough of their stack is reaching end of life, we should do this major rewrite but I already am fairly certain they won't have to do it again for another 10 years. e.g. I have yet to deploy any production code for a client running on Nodejs, but I've written enough dependable systems in it on my own free time in the last 5 years that I think I might now finally advocate for it under certain circumstances, knowing the strengths and weaknesses. It does help - as you point out - to be in the position where the non-tech company will almost always take your advice if you tell them they need to change platforms. But the most effective way of getting yourself in that position is to prove that you exercise that option only when it truly is in their best interests.
bandrami 3y ago
I agree that it's dull but the fact that I still know ColdFusion 20 years later gets me a lot of work. No, it's not Silicon Valley money but it is Fairfax County money, which ain't bad.
- noduerme 3y ago
  Having a lifetime gig is worth more than all the startup stock options in the world. But then again, I like my own yard and sitting by my fire pit with a beer, and I don't spend too much time worrying what other people have.
mschuster91 3y ago
> your payrate is generally going to be quite a bit lower than industry standards at app/tech companies And so will be the workload. No semi-mandatory after-work drinking, no constant "hustling", no bullshit.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  This is completely anecdotal, but I was far more overworked as an engineer at a non-engineering company than at any engineering company I've worked at. The entire reason I went back to that work environment was because I was tired of "wearing multiple hats" (e.g. doing three people's work) for 2/3 the pay of wearing one of those hats at some random adtech company.
einpoklum 3y ago
> you'll be working on some old technology that only your industry utilizes and isn't well optimized for modern use cases or is extremely niche But it's easier to get a company to upgrade from old cruft to a commonly-used technology, of your choice and which you push, over trying to get the company to drop a new fad they've bought into ("You know, we don't really need all of those Docker images, and VMs, and Amazon Cloud services - let's just write an executable which does the thing and can be configured.")

noduerme 3y ago

Maintaining old systems and not getting the chance to exercise your hottest take on how they should be rebuilt is often tedious as hell. But I find a lot of comfort in it. I usually find that the future road maps that stick in my head for a year or more are the ones worth a 10-year overhaul, and I like to be able to tell clients that when enough of their stack is reaching end of life, we should do this major rewrite but I already am fairly certain they won't have to do it again for another 10 years. e.g. I have yet to deploy any production code for a client running on Nodejs, but I've written enough dependable systems in it on my own free time in the last 5 years that I think I might now finally advocate for it under certain circumstances, knowing the strengths and weaknesses. It does help - as you point out - to be in the position where the non-tech company will almost always take your advice if you tell them they need to change platforms. But the most effective way of getting yourself in that position is to prove that you exercise that option only when it truly is in their best interests.

bandrami 3y ago

I agree that it's dull but the fact that I still know ColdFusion 20 years later gets me a lot of work. No, it's not Silicon Valley money but it is Fairfax County money, which ain't bad.

noduerme 3y ago
Having a lifetime gig is worth more than all the startup stock options in the world. But then again, I like my own yard and sitting by my fire pit with a beer, and I don't spend too much time worrying what other people have.

mschuster91 3y ago

> your payrate is generally going to be quite a bit lower than industry standards at app/tech companies And so will be the workload. No semi-mandatory after-work drinking, no constant "hustling", no bullshit.

deaddodo 3y ago
This is completely anecdotal, but I was far more overworked as an engineer at a non-engineering company than at any engineering company I've worked at. The entire reason I went back to that work environment was because I was tired of "wearing multiple hats" (e.g. doing three people's work) for 2/3 the pay of wearing one of those hats at some random adtech company.

einpoklum 3y ago

> you'll be working on some old technology that only your industry utilizes and isn't well optimized for modern use cases or is extremely niche But it's easier to get a company to upgrade from old cruft to a commonly-used technology, of your choice and which you push, over trying to get the company to drop a new fad they've bought into ("You know, we don't really need all of those Docker images, and VMs, and Amazon Cloud services - let's just write an executable which does the thing and can be configured.")