Salary, Money, and Happiness

A friend of mine has been interviewing and weighing job offers from a few companies over the last few weeks after taking a sabbatical.

I’ve been helping him out a bit on some advice in regards to negotiating, weighing his offers, etc. He’s a highly paid engineer in San Francisco so he had no real “bad” options.

After a couple months into the process, he narrowed his offers down to two companies and offers:

Company A: Large public and reputable company that offered the most in total compensation which would be a nice pay bump from his last job.

Company B: Large public and reputable company that offered less than A, but still more than his previous job. He preferred the team, work life balance, and product here more than A.

He started doing a lot of research on Company A and found that it appeared that the company was on a downward trajectory with a lot of bad reviews and press recently. I could tell he was torn between taking the money or taking the job with the company he wanted most.

I advised him that his best bet is to determine what he valued more: 1) the money now or 2) the prospects of him growing more at the other company. I had thought he was going to choose Company B quite easily.

The next day he told me he chose Company A as the things he was indexing on, i.e. company not doing as well may be superficial and it was still a great company. I was a bit shocked, but supported his decision.

I too had been in a position at my last job. Do I stay and take the money, or do I leave to join a small start-up with much less pay but perhaps more direction into what I wanted to do? I chose the latter after months of painstaking deliberation.

At the end of the day, I don’t think I would’ve lived with myself if I passed up the opportunity I took. Sometimes you may need to take a step back to move forward, and it ended up being one of the best decisions of my life.

It wasn’t easy though. It’s much easier to talk about passing up the money than actually doing it. Taking a large paycut and thinking about the opportunity cost after X years was painful. At the end of the day, my gut took over and made up it’s mind.

I spoke to my buddy today and he told me that he was reneging on taking the offer with Company A and was going back to Company B and offering to take that position. At the end of his day, he went with his gut which I thought was the right decision.

The extra pay wasn’t worth it at the end and would not have made him any happier. I was stoked for him and proud that he made the right decision.