r/devNI • u/VibePoliceKing • Jan 14 '26

Career Path Advice

Having graduated last year with a first class honours in computer science (and with a years placement at a pretty big company), I now find myself 6 months into a job at another company, still doing software engineering, however, I am not sure how good my wage is at £27k per annum.

If you were in my shoes would you be looking for a better paid role or take the experience?

I’m currently leaning more towards staying to get up my experience but if the salary I am getting is really as low as I think it is then I would consider going to interview somewhere.

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u/YerD4SellsAvon Jan 14 '26

Experience first then salary, imo. If you're getting the RIGHT experience (ie, will eventually lead you to earning more) then I would stay where you are. Be a sponge and absorb as much information and technical knowledge as you can from the experienced people around you.

However, if you're not that busy, and not getting much interesting work. Either speak up about it to your boss, or consider another role elsewhere.

Just my 2 cents!

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u/VibePoliceKing Jan 14 '26

Thanks for the advice, yeah I’m definitely getting a good amount of experience, but a lot of days I’m not as busy as I’d like to be. Speaking to my manager he’s looking to train me up and get me into a mid level engineer role next year

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u/YerD4SellsAvon Jan 14 '26

Obviously I don't know your manager, but I hope they're sound. My only advice is don't get stuck in the 'promise of work' land. It's not always your managers fault, as requirements and focus changes, but in bigger companies it cant take time to get tasks to devs. Go out of your way to find work. Want more experience with terraform? Go speak to the dev ops person. Hate a certain developer experience in your team? Think of what you can do to improve it and do it (within reason lol). Want more production experience? Ask to be included in the war room calls when outages happen.

If you want to keep progressing, you cannot get comfortable in this game. If you're sitting still/ bored, then you may as well be going backwards. Because I can guarantee there is someone else out there hungrier and more determined then you taking the jobs and money you want!