Comment by cloudedcordial

OP here. I started out in a very niche small local software industry thinking they didn't do evil like the big corps did. The old guys who started the company were in great control. They just wanted to do the same stuff when they were new college grads (just minus the punch cards). Business growth was dead. Salary didn't even keep up with the inflation.

Then I took a QA position in a big corp after spending my 20s not saving any money. Even this manual/automated testing role qualified me for a 50% pay increase from the old job without salary negotiation. No dev shop took me after seeing I was clueless in recent tech stacks. After a few years, I was tired of the manual testing part and looked for a new job.

Then I had automation roles in a few local companies with increasing DevOps components. The companies are progressively less rigid so they are good in letting us exploring and using new tech stacks.

My belief in not doing "evil" in my 20s has hurt me financially and career-wise in the long term. I didn't read industry news before I turned 30. The QA job, even if the company had some controversies, was a savior to stop beating a dead horse.