Originally Posted by Elevation

The traditional career track works best in my opinion.

I spent my first 8000 hours trying to avoid airlines. Mostly this was due to me wanting some strange life experience (living in Africa, flying in combat environments and other stuff that's essentially meaningless). I rationalized this to myself and my wife by latching on to complaints from pilots who were at regional carriers. Corporate, charter and defense contracting treated me very well, but I found no company with decent pay and QOL would look at me. Then as now I had a clean record, degrees, recommendations, etc.

As soon as I was at a regional I suddenly got calls from my current carrier and a number of LCCs.

My two take-aways from that experience:
1.)
In the minds of HR, they think they know what they're getting with airline employees. Not the best. Not the worst. But they are getting a predictable asset in comparison to people they may pull from 135, corporate and other backgrounds. (FWIW, I think all pilots are roughly equal, but I'm not in HR.).

2.)
Flying at the regionals was awesome! The complaints I listened to for years were seriously overblown. I think that's because we hear complaints more acutely. Also the pilots you interact with in FBOs, etc. are people who have left the airlines for a reason. So your sample sets consist almost entirely of people who have decided to leave airline life.

Contrary to being a cesspit. I found that the base level of frustration and hassle in airlines was about the same as any other flying job. Some aspects of airline flying, even at the regionals, were vast improvements.

My career has been very good to me financially and personally. If there's one piece of advice I could offer it's this:
Do your own research and try not to listen too much to the commentary of others.