Round about the time when I was supposed to go to Hong Kong with Mila and Deric, I was presented with a choice. Shopee or DSTA. One offered way better total compensation and possible WFH, while the other does not. The choice seems obvious if I put it that way, but you will be surprised at the choice I made. Here is the breakdown of the package I was offered.
| Shopee | DSTA |
|---|---|
| 6800 SGD 95.2k SGD annual 2 months on target bonus (dependent on company) 1-2 months historically 18 days per year + 14 sick leave + 2 days family leave $5 co-payment Tele consult free 1k SGD claim limit 300 SGD dental and specs Ennhanced learning subsidy ( 1k subsidy) 1 Week deadline Wang Ke reporting manager | e01 - 6200 + 400 allowance (without bonus) probational offer - 1 year probation 6 months mid term (5400) benefits - 18 days leave 14 days medical leave 1 birthday leave medical - mos scheme 500 / year subsidy staff pays 16% of medical bill (50 bucks cap for private) dental - 85% of dental per visit (250 / year) flexi benefits - at end of financial year april payoff in may (580 bucks) annual salary - perf bonus (15.85 months on target) (july pay)+ AWS + cs payment july start date |
| It might come as a shock to you. But I chose Shopee. Here’s why. |
The perception of DSTA
There is a strong general consensus that DSTA is an “eye-power” organisation. That means that you, as an engineer, would most likely play a PM role, and not really a technical role.
I spoke to several people regarding DSTA, mainly Timothy (ex-DSTA engineer from my grandmother’s nursing home) and Zheng Han (ex-DSTA engineer I knew from Mila). The below information, will be largely shaped by the information provided by them.
Zheng Han mentioned that it is not always the case that you will be doing a mainly PM role, there are some development houses that does actual development work, one of them is the INFO div, which I was assigned under. So by that fact, I will most likely not be doing a PM role, and probably would be doing actual development work. But there is a problem with perception.
If the public and my hiring managers think that DSTA engineers mostly do PM work, they will reject my application outright, or have some preconceived perception of me. That probably would not play in my favour when I want to find my next job. So, even though this perception might not be true, if it is still rampant in the industry, why would I willingly join DSTA and label myself as that? I would have to fight both the interviews and the perception of being more of a PM than an engineer, and I would be lucky if I even have a fighting chance, some companies may just outright reject me.
My issue with the public sector
I was speaking to Timothy over the phone one night during a family dinner at Kamboat in Rendezvous hotel. I posed him a question which I read online, and his response was one of the largest factor that led me to choose Shopee over DSTA.
I read online that there is a lot of unhappiness amongst the older DSTA employees. The main issue was due to the pay gap between the fresh grads new hires, and the older employees. To my surprise there is a considerable number of people in DSTA that has been in the organisation for a few years and are paid less than a fresh grad who just entered. That was quite shocking. Imagine you are a DSTA employee for 3-4 years, and there is a fresh grad who just came in earning higher than you. How would you feel?
So what was Timothy’s response to this. Well, he is largely trying to encourage me to choose DSTA, but he said this. “Those people agreed at the point of hire that amount of salary, why are they complaining? If they are not happy with that salary then they shouldn’t even have accepted the offer” I was taken quite aback by this. It really requires a mindset shift to see from his perspective. From his point of view, at the point of your hire, you lock in that salary and it will follow you throughout your tenure there. So whoever who agreed to lock in with that amount, should be happy with that amount, and shouldn’t complain. He also told me not to always compare with others. I do agree that we shouldn’t compare, but if someone is working less and with less experience yet is paid way more than me, isn’t it just unfair?
Well this issue is not only limited to DSTA. It has also come to my attention that it is the same case in the Police force. Guan Zhou’s sister is currently working as a police inspector and is still being paid around 5k even after a couple of years. However, Fabian who just entered as a police inspector got a salary of around 6k? How is this even fair?
Now, I have to admit this issue is not unique to the public sector. It is also prevalent in the private sector. But here’s the thing. In the private sector, jumping is easy, and for every jump most people would get a small or large pay jump. This makes the issue of this pay difference kind of moot.
Why is there such a phenomenon?
The entry pay to an organisation will largely reflect the market conditions at that time. That’s why when someone enter an organisation a couple years back when pay is lesser, he or she is kind of locked in and the pay increments will scale according to that. It is almost unseen of that a company or organisation will increment all their employees according to the increment of their entry pay. That does not make economic sense.
So to sum in this long point, I learnt that jumping between companies or organisations is an important point if we want to maximise our compensation. So, naturally, I chose the job that gave me (or what I think will give me) the best platform to jump to my next adventure.
My considerations
I really really took a long time to come to this decision. I even prompted ChatGPT on multiple occasions just to let it help me make a decision or at least rationalise my thoughts to help me come to a decision. My prompts to it largely revolved around the below points.
The rise of AI, is DSTA a safe haven?
As we all know and at the time of this writing, AI is rampant, and taking over many different industries slowly. One of the first was the software engineering, and by extension the tech sector. Many people said that AI will takeover the job of a software engineer. Although that has yet to happen, but judging from the openings that I saw on LinkedIn for graduate entry level software engineering jobs, the demand for entry level software engineers have fell, by quite a lot. Companies can do more with less. So why hire an entry level engineer?
The issue of job security, and how if a groundbreaking LLM came about, I would most likely lose my job in Shopee. But in the public sector, job security is almost guaranteed, if software engineers are no longer needed in the world, DSTA would probably repurpose me to do something else. What’s more, DSTA would probably also train me well to be a PM and a vendor manager, which is a good pivot into another field, if I were to say so myself. So, I would say, if the world will to go crazy, DSTA would be a safe haven. I need not worry about whether i’m going to lose my job if something comes along from OpenAI.
But in one of my other thoughts about AI & The Future, you know that I don’t really think that’s going to happen.
I have no qualms being a PM
Many of my peers hate the idea of being a manager. Many of them want to remain as an individual contributor, and I guess that’s the beauty of the software engineering field. You don’t have to be a manager to rise up the ranks. You can rise and be equally highly compensated, just like a manager.
But, I don’t mind being a manager. Many of these people I refer to in the above paragraph, I would label them as logical thinkers, or people who just don’t want the stress. I would label myself as more emotional, and able to read the room well. I just don’t know how to act in certain scenarios when I receive too much information about a room. For now, my goal is to rise up the junior technical path, and eventually switch to the managerial path. But if DSTA offers me a speedup by giving me a more PM related role, isn’t that better? I can just start at the place where I want to eventually end up in.
Follow the crowd
“You can’t go wrong with Shopee, almost all of NUS CS is there.” That was what Hong Ming said to me when I was deciding. I know that following the crowd makes you blend in and not be anything special. But… I would definitely know that it is not a wrong choice right?
Fabian argued the exact opposite. He cited the example of how not too long ago, Shopee was like Accenture, who mass hired a bunch of NUS graduates. And he mentioned how the people from Accenture were “subpar” and “in their own world”. I forgot the exact example he cited that led him to that conclusion, but I would say that most likely that is not an accurate representation of this trend.
So I would sum up by saying, Shopee probably won’t be a wrong or good choice, but DSTA could either be an amazing choice or a really really bad one. So which would you have chosen?
The rise? of China?
Here is a big point. I’ve always been told that China would be the next superpower, but i’ve been very conflicted. China seems to be winning in certain aspects, yet losing very badly in several other aspects. So are they winning? will they be the next superpower? I really don’t know.
China won in data. Data is the blood of AI and LLMs today. Without data, these LLMs cannot be built. China has multiple sources of data ingestion with their crazy privacy breaking surveillance systems. This will thus require a large and extensive data infrastructure. And that’s where I am now, in the Shopee’s data infrastructure team, largely poached from DiDi in China. I would think that would be a great avenue for me to learn the ropes of data ingestion, making sense and using the data properly. That’s one of the plus points of Shopee.
If China were to get their shit together, and massively expand their tech landscape to the point that many foreigners (or at least Chinese able-speaking foreigners) are incentivised to come to China to work, being in Shopee would be a large competitive advantage, being in a part-china company, learning the culture the language, and forming multiple connections with my colleagues from mainland china. Not only that, as I outlined in AI & The Future, one of Singapore’s competitive advantage is its largely chinese speaking population. This will allow me to have more options when finding my next job, as I can cast my net wider to not only western companies, but chinese ones as well.
Once you slack, you can’t go back
Your youth is a perfect time to make stupid mistakes, fight like hell, stay up late working on something only to realise it was a mistake, and still live with little to no consequences. It is a time to work hard because your body allows you to. If you start off with a chill life until you end up in your mid to late 30s then trying to get to the grind at that age will be hard.
I would think that Shopee would be way more intense and fast paced as compared to DSTA. For one, the mandatory 5 days WFO says a lot about the Shopee work culture, and I want that, I want the life of working on something exciting all day no matter if it is a good idea or bad. But, sadly, now that i’m in shopee, I realised that i’m in one of the most chill team in the whole of shopee lol. But I guess this is a good opportunity for me to practice my Leetcode and prepare for my next adventure?
The future is uncertain
Not too long after I locked in my decision to join Shopee, Fabian asked me why I made the decision, and he personally thought that it was a bad idea. In his case, he chose the police force because it has been his childhood dream to become a police officer. His argument was that you need to be different from the crowd to truly stand out, and he said that if you play your cards well in the public sector, you can game the system and rise up the ranks even without a scholarship.
But here’s the thing, unlike him, I really don’t know what I want to do. Do I still want to remain in such a technical role? Maybe I want to go into other fields in the future. If I were to start off in the public sector, I would largely only stay there for the rest of my life. Breaking out is hard. However, if I were to start off in the private sector, I would think that, it is much easier to break into the public side. During my interview at DSTA, the interviewers seem to downplay the public sector and look at the private sector in envy, saying how slow DSTA is compared to the private sector.
So, to sum up, Shopee gives me more options. And in one of the drinking sessions during my last sem in NUS, right after my offer at Ascenda got rescinded, I mentioned that one of my greatest takeaways from that whole ordeal is that in life “we need to keep maximising our options”. So, I guess i’m just heeding my own advice? Maybe I’ll look back and think I made the wrong call. But at least I’ll know I made the call that kept me running, not waiting.
In the end, I didn’t choose Shopee because it was perfect — I chose it because it kept the most doors open. And at this stage of my career, keeping doors open feels more valuable than walking through just one.