Choosing Between Software Engineer VS Cyber Security (Early Career) | Cyber Security VS SWE Jobs

all right so today's video is going to be another one for the cyber security versus software engineering playlist that we have so today we are joined by Luca who is a software engineer engineer he also has a channel so definitely check out check it out and if you are new to my channel I am Sandra and I currently work as a security analyst and today we're going to be answering questions on all things early career just comparing our experiences in the last three to four years of working as a suite and working as a cyber security professional sounds good so first things first we're going to start off with the juiciest question which is with our initial starting salary so I'm going first yeah so I want to say like uh right out of college I got a return offer from my previous internship and the offer was about adk for the Delaware area so for that location it's actually pretty competitive and uh I later got a few other offers such as like one of them was the one that I decided to go with which is Google and uh for Google it's a very very straightforward like you either have a competing offer that's like from Airbnb or someone who pays you a lot or you're pretty much just gonna get the standard beginner salary compensation so for the West Coast the standard starting package was 120k based salary plus 100K stock over four years I forgot how much your Scion bonus it was but I I think it was about 40K does that sound right 40. 40 remember yeah yeah it'd been a long time but it was something like pretty high to be honest like and the Scion bonus was also something that I tried to negotiate but then of course like I had to change location so there it was some other stuff happening but uh yeah that was a pretty much the overall total conversation I think it came out to be around 200k for the first year so My starting salary in my previous videos which I can link down below for negotiations and things like that but I started off in a rotational program it was a cyber security retention program for a financial institution and I originally was offered a hundred and five thousand dollars in the New York City metro area and then I negotiated and got that up to 115 um I didn't get any sign-on bonuses or relocation or anything fancy like a fan company but eventually I ended up getting some rsus you got the stock pretty much they give it but it was down to Wine you had to work for like a year they give it to you and then it doesn't investigate for another year they're fresh it's like stock refresh yeah so you don't actually get in until two years after you start I gotcha yeah you go like if you join you don't get refreshed until your second year so like even if you join January you won't get your stock refresh until you know a year later they recently changed that policy all right the next up we're going to talk a little bit about growth in our early careers I think maybe like maybe like races yeah I guess like the focus for growth I guess there I see a more like two ways like how much knowledge you growing as an individual something that you can't really measure with like monetary values and of course you have like the title promotion and the monetary promotion like salary pop so I would say like doing my time while I was working like I learned so much like it was like crazy how much I learned and how much I've realized the college classes were absolute going in the wrong direction like what I learned in classes is like doesn't really help me at all for software engineer especially like when the tax stack is so different no one holding your hand no teaching assistants who you can ask questions to so like it's more hands-off and I would say like that give me a lot of value in learning I would say like this is that's the most I have learned in a long time and I would say most likely what happens like depending on your rating you can have really good rating but the first rating you get it's always like treat you to evaluate in the Army joint so like the most likely your first cycle will be like me talk because like they don't have a legitimate rating for you just yet and then after that depending on your rating directly reflect how much salary increase you can get and uh generally speaking in order to get to the next level they want you to perform at the next level already for at least two performance review cycle so before Google had this two performance review cycle a year but now they're shifting towards the one review a year so I don't know how they're gonna calculate like how long you have been so like a lot of these is up to your manager so manager relationship and getting up to work on good project really matters I would say overall you can't expect too much salary growth even if you get title promotion just because you're already performing at the next level your salary kind of already reflected that's the algorithm part like they make it so like your salary is already at the next so before you get promoted so when you get promoted are you really good is like the additional bonus and you won't see a dramatic change here with salary no it's interesting to know because I feel like when people hear that you get promotions they're thinking like 20 30 percent double your salary boom yeah yeah that is not what happens especially in your early career unless you're like going to like the MD level um yeah really good director yeah director level for attack yeah I think for me as well the salary increases were also very small I do think I learned a lot and my first year in my job or after the first year I actually got my certification for my Security Plus and I think that definitely helped me not monetary in my career but it helped me overall with the I think trajectory of my career just for the roles that I can apply to and the different types of companies that would want to hire me in cyber security and I think for salary I really only got like a smallish bump um it's like the typical like one two three percent that you would get at a normal company and that was after graduating from my rotational program yeah I think I mentioned it earlier but I also ended up getting the rsus or restricted stock units but it was kind of like an extra bonus it's also invested for four years so basically 100 of your stocks that you get you split it by 25 for four years and you get that much every year but yeah the longer that you work at the company the more that you get because every year you're going to get yeah more and more yeah yeah it's like a Snowball Effect you end up getting more the better you perform yeah um and the longer that you're at a company so yeah I think overall growth not necessarily slow I feel like we are definitely very fortunate to start at relatively High starting salaries I would think yeah like it's crazy to think because like back in college even before I switched into computer science I study electrical engineer or something like we were hoping for like you know 60 70k like that's already like that's already like a really competitive starting salary like no way like I expected to getting paid like more than 100K to run out of college so like yeah yeah so I think we don't want to you know send out jaded Vibes you guys thinking that oh we only got 100K for our starting salary is out of college um it's definitely not the case we are definitely very fortunate to be in a position to even be able to negotiate our salaries or be able to work at companies who offered us this amount of salary out of college and another caveat is something I'm sure is like refreshed and the resting like sure they promised this much but you only get to keep what you are already bested so if you leave before the four year mark you only get whatever already faster everything else is just gone yeah I think that's why in Tech there's that term golden handcuffs where yeah too much every year yeah you you know get some kind of stock refresher or you get a promotion and you kind of want to stay because you have this extra money on the table and you're kind of leaving it behind yeah you keep giving you something it's like putting snack Trails like yeah Chase off definitely an interesting phenomenon I'd be interested to see how that changes like you know after your recession and with so many people saying things like salaries are over inflated and like there's gonna be changes coming up so it'll be interesting to see how that actually affects the overall yeah for sure Tech sector all right so the next opportunity is travel how much we travel at work um okay yeah I would say like uh as an engineer I actually don't expect to travel that much and that was pretty much the reality maybe like once every year we have this a huge director level product area conference that uh we just get together to celebrate what we have accomplished this year learn about other teams that come on punishment and uh think about the road map for the upcoming year so I would say that's the one time that we get to travel during the pandemic for the past two years it has been virtual so once again like not a lot of travel opportunities so I would say like yeah like on average I would say anything around one maybe two if there's a reason for you to attend some conference and your manager think it's a valid uh conference for you to attend yeah I would say same am for my previous role I the majority of my travel was done through conferences well I guess before the pandemic I attended more conferences but I probably attended about three or four in-person conferences um I mean one of them was a great Hopper conference which happens every year and that one was more so for like professional development and recruitment purposes but yeah I definitely think I was very lucky to be in a role because I know like in my previous company people a lot of people wanted to go to those conferences and in my current role I have done one kind of like team company on site so it's company-wide and we basically all just got together and it was also my first time meeting people that I've been working with remotely and yeah that was definitely a lot of fun um it was about a week I mean obviously we are working remotely which is the next topic that we're actually going to talk about I don't do as much travel compared to someone who might be you know a consultant who may be moving to uh their different customers sites and things like that so Consulting sales like those people like definitely travel a lot more than Tech yeah our next thing as we hinted at is working remotely a bit of a spoiler but we both are currently working remotely so I would say like uh for my company going remote is fairly straightforward most likely you will have to work here for a year just so they have some sort of record of your performance review and uh if you're someone who is performing really really well they're applying for remote it's just simply clicking the application button and then switches your mouth and I would say it really depends on your team so most of my teammates are actually not remote they prefer hybrid either because they live really close to the office like walking distance or they're someone who worked at a previous company that was remote so they wanted to go in and you know get the free food and stuff like that so like enjoy the perks and I also know a lot of other of my cross events who are remote and uh yeah so I would say overall the team for other team is actually pretty diverse and we also have people co-workers working from different locations so like that technically is a sort of remote because like you don't really get to see your co-worker in person so I would say overall it's pretty flexible yeah for my previous company I originally working full-time in the office until the pandemic and then started working from home after that we're going to transition back into the office and I've touched on it a little bit on my channel but my team was originally going to be full-time back in the office with no hybrid setup and that was originally what I would have wanted so yeah my current role I am fully remote and my team is also fully remote actually we're like a remote first company so nice we do have offices but most people work remotely so I think that's definitely something to note and honestly now I prefer working remotely if there was ever a time when I wanted to go back into the office I would probably prefer some kind of hybrid but more so just like based on what people want to do like exactly like not hybrid but more so like uh your team can decide like oh let's let's all go in like maybe next week like on Wednesday or something like give you the choice like yeah yeah I think the flexibility of choice is very important yeah I think that's the main thing for me as well like I wouldn't mind going to the office it's just the idea that they force you to go in twice a week I don't know about that that's why like I would rather be like remote and then whatever I want our next thing is going to be an interesting one and it is how boring slash interesting your work is so how often do you find yourself bored versus how often do you find yourself having fun or being challenged at work I think a lot of times when I like recall is like my first joint it's like definitely exciting all the tasks were very challenging so like you know that keep you engaged but also at the same time like stressful so I would say once I become more used to the tech snack like how everything works it becomes a lot more fun and at the same time like I'm getting more and more challenging task from my manager so I can get promoted of course and uh that made it challenging and fun I think the only time I was really bored is when there's too much like decision making which is very very low like maybe for like a week where in between projects like we don't know what we can do for the next one maybe like we run into some like legal or privacy concerns that we want to resolve before we can move forward then like I'm stuck in kind of period where I'm not doing actual work but I'm doing like engineering excellent works like making the code better or like seeing areas that can help improve I wouldn't say I was necessarily bored ever I would say like when you're not doing much it could be considered like boring but I was overall very engaged and I think that's something like I enjoy a lot I mean then again it's kind of sad it's like non-stop task one after the other but at least they keep you engaged I think because I was part of rotation program it definitely made it harder to get bored because the shots that I was in were just one year reputations and I think I was able to learn a lot in all those roles since they were all so different but I think one thing that I noticed was probably the part that I disliked the most found the most boring was working with spreadsheets and Excel and obviously I am not a accounting Finance person but there's a lot of cyber security metrics that are put in Excel spreadsheets to share with senior leadership to present during calls to just calculate certain things things that we have because obviously Telemetry and just metrics in general can be hard to Wrangle with when you you know don't have like a data scientist or someone that's actually actively digging through the data so we rely heavily on Excel for a lot of things and personally I've never been a huge person who loves doing the vlookups and the uh pivot tables and stuff like that but yeah so I think that was the part where I found myself kind of getting a little bit bored and like having to meticulously look through different things manually um having some you know we obviously had some kind of like good check in the Excel spreadsheet but a lot of the work was manual yeah uh new yeah there are definitely days where I was just working through Excel for like the entire day for like four or five hours and those would not be very fun and especially because it's recurring so you have to do it like on a weekly basis or on a monthly basis so yeah I would think that's probably the part where it gets a little bit boring but everything else it's kind of cool and new especially in your early career all right so hopefully we answered a lot of your questions about our experiences being able to work remotely um obviously we have kind of different but similar experiences but it honestly it will all depend on your team the company for you yeah if you're a remote or in person or hybrid just the overall team culture that they are going to be going into and if you like this video please give a thumbs up and subscribe and turn on post notifications I post videos every Wednesdays and Sundays at 12 p.m and Luca post videos every Saturdays at 12 p.m so definitely check out his videos on software engineering and all things Tech careers Linked In the description below and hopefully we'll see you guys in our next videos bye [Music] foreign

Channel: Sandra - Tech & Lifestyle

Views: 112,025

Keywords: cyber security vs software engineer 2022, software engineer vs cyber security, choosing between software engineer vs cyber security 2022, software developer vs cyber security, software developer vs cyber security jobs, software engineer vs cyber security analyst, coding vs cyber security, software developer vs cyber security career, software developer vs cyber security careers, Software Engineer vs pentesting, software engineer vs cyber security entry level, swe vs cybersecurity

Id: _tXpM3KFZEw

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2022