I've been working at a large company that has several locations and hands in a few different sectors as an EE for about a year now. I mainly do sustaining, so troubleshooting line failures and finding alternates to obsolete parts.

My boss has said that he won't give a good recommendation to anyone on his team that tried move departments unless they are an expert in their current role so I have a feeling I'm stuck in this role for awhile. It's not terrible I have good benefits and sometimes I'm spread way too thin but sometimes it's pretty relaxed.

The deal is I don't feel like I'm learning a lot and embedded software is my passion. I love bringing processors to life and making something sentient it's like a very fun puzzle. Sometimes it seems so simple other times its a frustrating mysterious void but I really have loved every moment I've spent coding.

I applied to a smaller company for an embedded software position. It would be hybrid, a 5k pay cut, and a 50 minute commute (currently it's only 15 minutes).

Their company seems to be dying but they are trying to bring their products up to date. They make comments like "we can't compete on features so we focus on making things that don't fail" and talk about how they almost went out of business in 1990. There are only 4 other software engineers and it sounds like I would be single handedly designing software for a revamp of one of their controllers. I like the idea of being a big part of the team and the experience I would get on a project like that.

In my mind it's at least a step into the embedded software world, especially considering the longer I'm away from software the harder it will be to break into, it but it's also risky. I don't know how good it actually would look on a resume and I always worry about the culture at smaller companies. I've found they can be really toxic. There's only one other woman but she's a manager of the mechanical team.

What advice would you give this 25 year old that doesn't have the experience to make a good decision here?