I live in Redmond and work at Microsoft. I'm 38 and have a family. I'm an "SRE" with a security clearance working on government cloud stuff. Mostly DevOps type work, but using tools that are pretty awful (running production systems on Windows, no linux or kubernetes etc).

I've been interviewing lately because I really don't enjoy the product and tech I'm working on. My work life balance is pretty good, very short commute and my on-call is just tedious boring shit during the day. I've never been paged outside of work hours in 2 years.

I have two offers (Seattle)

Current total comp at Microsoft is ~250k

AWS: $300k L5 Cloud Engineer - working on internal build/development tools for the government clouds: Manager says 2am pages will happen, and the team works 45-50 hours per week by his estimation.

Oracle: $325k (no benefits, W-2 contract). Sounds like I would be working with linux, kubernetes, java, python and doing DevOps for some data science platform. While I'm contracting, there are some work/life balance gaurdrails beacuse >40 hours means I get paid (same rate $156.25/hr).

In all 3 scenarios, on-call requires trip to secure facility to work on the issue. At MSFT this has been a non-issue for me because the product is only really used in the day.

Most people have said "Stay at Microsoft for life" even if the pay is less.

AWS promises the most career growth (?) and RSU upside, probably at the cost of work/life balance which at my age is precious to me.

Everyone is saying don't take the Oracle contract, but the work sounds most interesting to me, and it seems pretty chill from the people I have talked to. It also is highest pay, by a small amount (after insuring my family), for the first 2 years.

Everyone on "BLIND" says AWS is absolute hell, unless you luck out on team/manager.

Advice from the non-blind crowd?

Thanks!

user:	djks422
created:	July 19, 2021
karma:	6