Hi Taro. I got laid off in April from AWS. I interned at NASA JPL and I am considering going back fulltime and continuing to apply to tech companies. I don't have an offer but I am hopeful I would be able to connect with a team since I interned there one year and have 1.5 YOE at AWS. I have some concerns about joining JPL, because they are prototype and research focused. They don't have many production systems or serve customer traffic. They also operate mostly in small and independent groups so the engineering standards can differ a lot. The research group I interned at had poor engineering and code quality compared to AWS. The engineering environment is different than corporate. Some technologies and experiences missing at JPL that are common in tech are pipelines (CI/CD), TPS, tickets, oncall, debugging large and distributed systems, customer traffic, metrics, operational reviews. JPL pays poorly and has slow growth. You can be there 10 years and make less than an SDE-1 in FAANG. I don't have any visa issues. Finances are not a problem. Currently I have very low expenses and good savings because I didn't RTO and I am living with my parents. I have 1.5 YOE at AWS and 3 years of internships before that. I see the market picking up so I am tempted to keep trying for a tech company. Another thing to consider is that there is a lot of inertia when you join a job. I will have little time to look for other jobs in the first few months because I will be busy onboarding. I will also have less time to look for jobs and study for interviews. Please give advice :)

Since you're covered on the two biggest short term issues (Visa and Finances), I think you can be more selective about where you invest your time. However, the opportunity in front of you doesn't sound that bad from my POV though. Learning to prototype quickly can give you a huge advantage as many early stage companies are in need of MVPs to gather data and validate. Large companies have R&D arms that need this as well. Of course, it would be a big asset if you choose to build your own SaaS in the future. If JPL is missing those core capabilities, you essentially have a greenfield to play with. Sure there might be some red tape that won't let you stand up CI/CD on day 1, but you can easily demonstrate value of doing it since the baseline is essentially zero Don't worry about career progression / career model if this is not your long term gig anyways. As long as there's enough for you to do and learn within 1.5-2 years, that's more than enough. Although 2 years seems long given it's double your entire working life so far, but on a 40 year time horizon, it's only 5%.

Should I take a SWE job in government or keep trying to get back into tech after layoff?

Entry-Level Software Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazona year ago

Hi Taro. I got laid off in April from AWS. I interned at NASA JPL and I am considering going back fulltime and continuing to apply to tech companies. I don't have an offer but I am hopeful I would be able to connect with a team since I interned there one year and have 1.5 YOE at AWS. I have some concerns about joining JPL, because they are prototype and research focused.

They don't have many production systems or serve customer traffic.
They also operate mostly in small and independent groups so the engineering standards can differ a lot. The research group I interned at had poor engineering and code quality compared to AWS.
The engineering environment is different than corporate. Some technologies and experiences missing at JPL that are common in tech are pipelines (CI/CD), TPS, tickets, oncall, debugging large and distributed systems, customer traffic, metrics, operational reviews.
JPL pays poorly and has slow growth. You can be there 10 years and make less than an SDE-1 in FAANG.

I don't have any visa issues. Finances are not a problem. Currently I have very low expenses and good savings because I didn't RTO and I am living with my parents. I have 1.5 YOE at AWS and 3 years of internships before that. I see the market picking up so I am tempted to keep trying for a tech company.

Another thing to consider is that there is a lot of inertia when you join a job. I will have little time to look for other jobs in the first few months because I will be busy onboarding. I will also have less time to look for jobs and study for interviews.

Please give advice :)

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Discussion

(3 comments)

4
Casey Dai
•Career Coach • Former Head of Engineering
a year ago
Since you're covered on the two biggest short term issues (Visa and Finances), I think you can be more selective about where you invest your time. However, the opportunity in front of you doesn't sound that bad from my POV though.

Learning to prototype quickly can give you a huge advantage as many early stage companies are in need of MVPs to gather data and validate. Large companies have R&D arms that need this as well. Of course, it would be a big asset if you choose to build your own SaaS in the future.

If JPL is missing those core capabilities, you essentially have a greenfield to play with. Sure there might be some red tape that won't let you stand up CI/CD on day 1, but you can easily demonstrate value of doing it since the baseline is essentially zero

Don't worry about career progression / career model if this is not your long term gig anyways. As long as there's enough for you to do and learn within 1.5-2 years, that's more than enough. Although 2 years seems long given it's double your entire working life so far, but on a 40 year time horizon, it's only 5%.
1
Jaswir Raghoe
•Entry-Level Software Engineer at Looking for job
a year ago
You need to keep up your work rhythm, the longer you stay unemployed the fasters it's going to disappear. Even a crappy SWE job is way better than staying unemployed.
0
Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
a year ago
First of all, it's friggin' NASA. Sure, it's not a software-first technology company, but I'm sure there's tons of brilliant people there. If you had a great experience there as an intern and you're confident there's awesome engineers you can learn from, then NASA JPL seems like a wonderful place to fill in your career gap while the overall macro improves.

In fact, your financial security is actually a reason you should take opportunities like these:

My approach is generally to optimize for learning instead of compensation; however, this advice isn't applicable to everyone as some may have a burning need for top-of-market TC.

In your case, you can easily take a compensation hit in exchange for optimizing your learning/minimizing the jobless period.

Every month you spend grinding LeetCode and hoping to land a FAANG-level job again instead of working alongside talented people to grow beyond SDE 1 levels is a massive time loss.

If you focus on learning and just becoming an incredible engineer, your TC eventually catches up - Trust me. I talk about this in-depth here: "If my main goal is compensation, would it be wise to learn blockchain tech since it will potentially be the tech of the next couple decades?"

I also recommend the masterclass we gave on career direction if you haven't seen it already: [Masterclass] How To Choose A Good Company And Team As A Software Engineer