Your degree and your career aspirations - how do they match up?

One of the best attitudes ive seen on TSR regarding careers.

Someone already corrected her

Degree: Computer Science

Job/Career: Start off as a software developer and the end goal would be chief software architect - I want a position with overview of projects etc doing something I really enjoy, that is developing software for commercial use, and also I have seen chief software architects getting paid slightly over $200k a year (this is by no means a realistic goal its just what I really want to do)

Expected Starting Salary: £20-£30k (for Junior Software Developers - quickly rises up to $51-$70k for software developers after 1-3 years)

6 figures is well within reach with experience if you go freelance.

There's plenty of Senior Development roles advertised for £300-£600 per day depending on location.

If you watch the debate, you'll find the very first statement he makes is "I'm assuming nobody here just wants to make a lot of money, because then you'd go to Goldman. This is a debate for idealistic students."

Please go elsewhere with your shaming rhetoric. I care. I just know that I am very well suited to corporate work environments and I know I can make a hell of a difference if I succeed there. More than anywhere else.

It might make you feel warm and fuzzy pulling a splinter out of a kid's finger or building a house in Africa for a single family but every large scale project worth doing needs finance and I can support those things that actually matter, instead of piling into field that is already overly saturated with applicants (like medicine) and people who are in it because they want society to think they're kind, considerate and decent people.

I'll have to carry the judgement of people like you for my whole career and it's silly because it's unjust.

I have met many of these kinds of people. "Oh no, I don't go into banking for the money, I do it for the excitement". Which may actually be true, gambling is exciting isn't it? But the "make a difference" is new. What exactly do you think you can make a difference on?

I think I explained earlier in the thread but I'll hash it out once more using medicine as a placeholder for 'traditionally altruistic career' and banking as 'high paying career':

The theory is that traditionally 'altruistic' fields like medicine have an abundance of good hearted people ready to go into the career. If I go there as an altruist, wanting to help people, I wouldn't be making a difference, compared to if I hadn't gone into the field, since there are 50 other wannabe doctors who'd fill my shoes and do a good job.

Further, a doctor's impact isn't scalable. They can only treat so many patients a day with the time they have. Like any business, model, when time is the constraint it's not particularly effective. Research and policy are other areas of medicine that are interesting in this regard but not being a 'doctor', per se.

Next, we have the issue of whether a doctor actually has a big impact. The average doctor doesn't actually save many lives over their career. We might think about surgeons and ER doctors saving hundreds of people a month but the reality is much less. In fact, a £10000 donation to an organisation giving medical aid like vaccines in developing countries saves more lives than a whole career as an average doctor.

Just like with medicine (I would not be missed if I didn't become a doctor) also with Banking there are a line of people who'd snatch at the opportunity to do so. In this instance, though, the line is generally people greedy, self-centred people (insofar as the reasons they're going into it). So if the industry is damaging, my boycotting it based on ideal alone is juvenile and futile. However, if I go into banking and can stomach the potential things I'd be involved in, going into finance and using an non-insignificant amount of my compensation to fund the areas I find compelling (like those mentioned above), I can have not only a much bigger positive social impact than I would in medicine but 'close the gate' to somebody who wouldn't help in finance and also 'open the gate' to one more altruist who wants to be a doctor. Therefore, there's a net positive effect.

Also, banking looks great. High pressure, high risk, high reward. I like the sound of it. My reasons aren't absolutely altruistic. I'm not going to be living on £50000 a year for the rest of my career. But if you have even an inkling of altruism in you then the answer to fulfilling it is a counter-intuitive 'follow the money and put it where it needs to be' (high demand low attention) which is definitely not what medicine is, as we can see by the high competition.

Oh you, sacrifice yourself for us, will you.

Why do people do that?

I didn't say that I'm benevolent. I'm not.
But if you want to make the biggest difference possible it is rational. This is essentially a thought experiment. Truthfully, like I said in the last paragraph, it's not like I'm doing it just to make a difference lol. I want to have a good life and work that seems interesting.

Find a flaw in my argument, instead of resorting to what is essentially an ad hominem.

I think I'm just going to apply for Google Mountain View as a software engineer for every year during postgrad uni and if I get in then just ditch the postgrad degree and go for that sweet $105k a year package.

There are other bay area tech companies, not just Google. :' I've seen a lot of people start off in a non-US office, then transfer over to SV. Think the visa process is easier than applying straight.

Did you know they have a Tokyo dev office? You don't even need to know Japanese

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I see you post on literally all of the computer science boards, you seem really clued up on the stuff I am actually interested in.

The big packages, idgaf about all the other guys on here who have this "urghh its a 1 in 24,000 chance of you getting into MV Google, you have unrealistic expectations and the salary projections on glassdoor are bs", that is not the attitude I like to see the people who accept those cynical attitudes have no hope of succeeding. Its pretty refreshing to see someone who actually knows about the top level jobs and like yeah f**k it I'll apply to every single one of those packages in my last year of bachelors degree, if I don't get it then its a masters degree followed by careful career planning so I get a promotion or pay rise every ~3 years.

So my question I guess is do you know of any of these packages, a lot like Google Mountain View, which are so good I'll completely abandon my plans of doing a masters and phd because this salary and experience is worth so much more.

Cheers in advance

I don't know the tech industry, but surely you want to be in the position where you are recruited/headhunted rather than have to apply yourself. I.e. you need to be good, really good.

Large tech companies usually have a policy of not using outside recruiters or headhunters. All sourcing is done via application, recommendation or an internal recruiter reaching out.