I was recently asked a question by Joshua (slightly edited). He is still studying, but now looking forward to his first serious job search.

I have a question. If you dont mind asking Which is the best company to work as beginner. I am trying to look to get in a couple of company types:

• Consulting. Kind of B2B where I can work in different project and will have a huge learning.
• Engineer. Here the role is DevOps engineer where I am the part of company. More “real world” experince.

I am confused which path should I pick.

A couple of things I am considering:

1. For me right now learning > salary. Why? I believe If I do have enough skills I can earn more in future.
2. Switching job in future I am worried. If I worked as consultant will it be transistation to engineering role in future

Of course there’s no single correct, or one-size-fits all answer. But this is how I responded:

Right on with #1. I think learning is almost always more important than salary (unless of course you can’t even pay the bills, then salary becomes super important!) Here are some of my basic suggestions:

• Don’t worry too much about which company you join. You’ll (probably) change a lot. Most people in tech change roles every 2 years or so. So if you find that your first job isn’t perfect, don’t worry, you’ll have many more.
• Choose a job/company based on which will help you achieve your personal career goals. If you’re still exploring, that can mean taking a job that will give you more exposure to new things, rather than focusing on something specific. So as an example: Maybe you’d prefer to work for a consultancy, so you can interact with many clients/projects, rather than working with a traidtional company where you may work with only a single project.
• As your career goals change (and they should!), adjust your criteria for jobs. This could mean a change in technical stacks, it could mean a focus on a specific type of business or problem domain, etc. Just be constantly thinking about what’s important to you, and adjust accordingly.

If you want to go into consulting, or launch your own startup, your career path will be different than if you’re just interested in solving difficult problems, and you don’t care who for. And of course as you grow in your career, you’ll probably become interested in certain types of problems. Maybe you’ll become interested in the problems associated with scaling databases, or with with networking technologies, or with graphical UIs, or with team structure and managing people, etc.

Is there anything you would add?