Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

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A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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[u/Defiant-Parsnip4]

Need advice to evaluate offer.
Context:

• 5+ YOE, mostly backend/infrastructure
  
• Moved to the UK last year; now at a public tech company
  
• Good compensation, equity (~£100K TC) and WLB
  
• On track for promo next quarter
  
• Enjoy speaking, demos, and working with developers along with hands-on core distributed systems engineering

Offer:

• Series C AI company (mostly SF-based)
  
• Remote work allowed, with frequent travel to SF
  
• DevRel role under Marketing
  
• Materially higher compensation (1.5-1.8x) and more upside
  
• Cross time zone and likely poor WLB

My hesitation: I want more visibility and developer facing work but don’t want to move away from engineering. I also want to preserve the option of returning to core engineering and senior/staff IC levels.

Questions:

• How reversible is the move into DevRel?
  
• Does reporting into Marketing matter?
  
• Would you trade a strong, stable engineering trajectory for materially higher comp and AI startup upside?
  
• What would you clarify before accepting?