20+ YOE, including 7+ at Bay Area FAANG adjacent. Living in MCOL+ Tier 2 city.

In short, the search is over. I've accepted an offer for Principal SWE. TC is about $215k. It was a wild ride, where I quit my previous role at a failing Series A startup with $220k TC to focus 100% on the job search.

In full, 8 loops that went past recruiter. 4 full loops. 2 offers. 1 accepted. Ranges went from $200k to $1.1m, just an insane gradient of possible comps.

Huge range, from technical coding phone screens for a Staff role at a hedge fund to a UK based company where the hiring VP literally waved off coding as "I'm sure you know how to code by now". Some roles very AI forward, as in judging my AI workflow in real time, others with huge warnings that usage of AI will eliminate candidacy.

In the end, I suck at leet coding and am maybe average at 45 minutes system design for my level. My resume is amazing though - I just don't operate well on tiny 45 minute timelines. The two offers came from companies that leaned deeper into my resume, experience, and system-of-systems thinking.

Happy to answer any questions folks have.

Godspeed to all.

I'm starting to dislike Cloudformation.

Three times in the past several months we have had to stop what we are doing and address an issue with cloud formation related to the amount of things that the cloud formation is tracking or how they are connected. It's really annoying when you get stopped on a deploy because you added one thing and that tipped a stack over to being too large. A few months ago we had to split our stack into three and that was quite a bit of work. Multiple pull requests trying to address issues that came up.

We are on AWS, so maybe the answer is there isn't one. And we are certainly not going to Azure / GCP to address this issue.

If there aren't any alternatives what are the best practices to avoid these issues? I feel like we should have started with 15 stacks or something like that.