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Ask Slashdot: How Much Is a Fun Job Worth?
Nicros writes "I have the good fortune to be a lead software engineer in a really fun company. The culture and people are great, and while the position has some down sides (distance from home, future opportunities), in general I'm quite happy there, and I wasn't looking for a new job. Now, I've had an offer to go be a software director for a new company. The pay is more than 10% better, the location is closer to home, and the people seem nice. I would get to grow a new group as I saw fit, following some regulatory guidelines. Problem is, I just can't decide what to do, and I'm not even sure why I can't decide. Maybe it has to do with leaving a job that I like (something I've never done) that just doesn't sit well with me. Maybe it's fear. I'm 40, so maybe it's just getting older and appreciating stability more. But then again, I have my current position dialed in, and could use a change. I have ambition, and my current company has made every effort to work with me to develop my career — probably more in the business development side, but that could be fun too. That career path is just more vague and longer-term than jumping right into a director position, with no guarantee that it would even work out. In the new company, software is not what this company does primarily; not many people would use the software, so the appreciation level would be much lower than my current position. Has anyone made a transition like this in software? How did it work out? Did you stay or did you go? Why? What's more important, the people and culture at a job, or the opportunities that job presents for future growth?"
A fun place to work is, well... fun! But if you aren't happy (pay, commute, promotion, etc) then you aren't happy and soon you'll start to resent the fun place.
Take my advice, find a job you are happy with and make it the fun place!
crazy dynamite monkey
It's the devil you know vs. the devil you don't. That's the hesitation, I'll bet.
I've changed jobs several times to find one that was more fun or closer to home. I've never had to choose between more fun and a shorter commute. I'd think about the commute and the entertainment value well before I thought about the money.
Don't forget that you spend a major part of your life there. Unless this is an "up or out" kind of situation, stay. 10% more money is not that much. And building up a team comes with a serious risk of failure, often by factors outside of your control.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unless they are paying you drastically more (20 or 30%), stay with the place you enjoy. Hell, you could just move closer to your current job.
It is hard to find a job you enjoy with people you like to work with. If this new place has problems, personal as well as business side, you are screwed. It will be hard to find a "fun" job again.
Money...otherwise, why would you bother to go to a job at all?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It all comes down to whether you think you will be happy with 10% more pay.
I've made similar leaps before for much greater increases and found the new company had some stuff under the carpet that I couldn't see until I was working there. If you choose to jump, jump carefully.
Also mind that you seem to be very happy with you current job and they seem to want to work with you. You *might* (be careful with this, use your own judgement here) tell your current boss that you have an offer in hand for 10% more and you are conflicted about the decision. You current boss *might* be willing to consider a pay nudge to keep you.
But of course, if you do this and get fired for looking over the fence, it is you own damned fault.
At 40, you should know by now that it isn't what your reward is, but how much you are enjoying it.
If a job offered me a 100% raise, but I had to commute an hour each way, I'd say no. My current commute is 7 minutes. That would mean I lose almost 2 hours of personal time in the evening every single day, and that is not worth doubling my salary to me. However, other people have different priorities for what they are looking to achieve.
If being closer to home and earning a little more money is more important to you and will bring you a greater sense of satisfaction and fulfillment than your current situation, then make the change. But if money isn't that important to you, you are "close enough" to home, and you are really happy at your current position, be sure you aren't just moving because "the grass is greener."
I've been there several times. Tell your current company about your offer, they will counter if they appreciate you as much as you say they do. Finish the negotiation process before you try to sort out your feelings about which position is best. If they don't your decision is made for you (you can't stay and still have any cred' if they don't try to keep you).
Somebody with those kinds of doubts doesn't really want to move. It's OK to stick with what you know. Just give yourself permission to be more concerned with security. Really. It's OK. A lot of people would love to be in your position. Yeah, somebody else might take job B, run with it, and make senior VP. They have no doubts; but if you try to do the Evil Kneival jump with doubts, you're gonna miss the ramp. When the jump is right, you won't even think about looking back, and you'll hit it just right.
I took a course decades ago that mentioned 'Hygeine needs' - google that. From that sort of thing...
Herzberg asked people about times when they had felt good about their work. He discovered that the key determinants of job satisfaction were Achievement, Recognition, Work itself, Responsibility and Advancement.
He also found that key dissatisfiers were Company policy and administration, Supervision, Salary, Interpersonal relationships and Working conditions.
So - more salary isn't as important a thing as other stuff. If you're underpaid (or think you are), you're unhappy. If you are paid enough you're happy. More than enough isn't a great lift.
I tend to agree - I could earn a helluva lot more in the US or Europe - meantime I'm enjoying low-stress NZ while we raise the kid and walk beaches with the dog. And I earn enough.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
The conventional wisdom says never take a counteroffer. Your loyalty is questioned so you'll be the first to go during layoffs, they'll take the pay bump out of your future raises, and other people will eventually find out. I've also heard about people taking a counteroffer and not actually getting one... by the time you realize this, the other position is filled.
It works not because it settles the question for you, but because in that brief moment when the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you are hoping for.
Flip a coin!
You haven't finished explaining the algorithm
Flip a coin!
a) If you agree, great.
b) If you want to flip again, go for 2/3 or otherwise reconsider the rules, then you wanted the other decision.
Really, while the question is not short, there is still much data missing (how far is "further away", how fun is "fun", etc, etc.). There is no exact formula that can help.
This is ridiculous, unless you like work for the mafia or something. Maybe there is some lunatic employers out there that hold their positions like a girlfriend but most realize that people (especially talented ones) might be tempted by outside offers. The only time I could think of that a normal employer would do stuff like that is if you are obviously leveraging the new position to twist their arm. A little honesty goes a long way, if he brought this question to his current employer they would respect the honesty and heads up most likely. I've left a couple companies who have countered and they would gladly take me back tomorrow.
Happiness = (Location) x (Pay) x (entertainment value or pleasantness of what you are doing)
try to normalize all inputs to a scale of 0 to 2, yielding a result ranging from 0 to 8. You will quickly see that any one thing can kill the whole deal (multiplying by 0 tends to do that), and that some things can only compensate for inadequacies to a limited extent. So... in a practical sense, this quantitative answer to such qualitative things as job pay, location, and how much you like what you are doing, might help make the analysis comparison easier. Tweaking this to fit your specific situation makes all the sense in the world. Good Luck!
I left a secure and extremely low-paying development/dba where I was the only programmer and got to call all the development shots to work in a dev team for a company that paid me 60% more than I was making at a previous company. In the year and a half I worked there, almost all the company's original founders were purged, we went through three directors of software engineering, two directors of qa, and two head product managers. The UX guy was ran off by a VP who wanted to do the usability themselves. And I had to serve under junior programmers who were only senior in the sense that they had been with the company for years, and every boneheaded thing they wanted to do was rubber-stamped by management. Project management for the desperately needed rewrite of the company's code was given to someone who had never done project management before. At some point development of that core product was transferred to an Indian offshore company to be worked on by programmers not familiar with the project's programming language; of course this didn't matter, because I wasn't doing very well at this company because I wasn't invited meetings where important architectural details were being discussed (which I was nevertheless responsible for implementing even though no one told me about them). The company was owned by a private equity firm, whose goal all along was probably reducing headcount and maximizing short term profit at the cost of large employee turnover and bad code. So looking back at my situation, I'm really not surprised at all that it happened.
Was this experience worth the 60% pay increase? I supposed I learned how to not run a software company, which might be valuable in the future. But my advice is to look for warning signs that might indicate that the new company might be extremely dysfunctional. Warning signs like the company being owned by a private equity firm, or all the founders of the business who made it great being purged, or lots of turnover among senior engineers and a dev mix made up of recent college grads and mediocre lifers who coast on their seniority. And try to figure out if possible why the previous guy left.
What are your drivers?
If you enjoy making software, and maybe running a team, then don't switch.
If you enjoy not knowing what's coming, dynamic situations with lots of change, and continually dealing with things that you haven't dealt with before, then change.
The money difference is not a big inducement, I'd say. Especially since you don't say how this new company will be funded - so you may be buying into 6 months of salary at 10% more, and then no job.
If after that you do think you are still interested in the job, it's really important to ask what you will control. If the big decisions are already made, and you are just a caretaker, then think twice as hard. Check how much budget you have. Check the constraints you'd be under. Check when you have to deliver software, and decide how viable it is. And ask for shares. A directorship without ownership is a fantastic way to load legal responsibility onto someone without the benefits of that responsibility. Culture of a company is important, what are your co-directors like? You'll set the tone for the people in your department - if you think they don't fit in, you'll be able to lose them - so that part of culture the culture is less important. The hat you wear as a director is completely different from making software; it's as table-tennis is to riding a bike.
Yep, I've done it. But it absolutely wouldn't be for everyone. Do the things that make you happy.
Where they pointed out people were happiest at either 75K or 85K
Travel. Nothing would make me sadder than watching my kids turn into insular jingoist xenophobes like their classmates. The only way I know of guaranteeing that that doesn't happen is to haul them around the world and let them loose. It's an expensive education, but it's worth every penny.
Granted, ignorance is bliss. If I had never known what is out there, I wouldn't care, and certainly wouldn't spend so much on airfare for my family.
The red flag for me was,
In the new company, software is not what this company does primarily.
I've always tried to be in companies in which what I did was directly tied to the company's main business. There is an analogy to a river: You want to be in the main stream, not in some backwater, so that when things get tight and money dries up, you're not left high and dry -- as in, a department or division that can be conveniently closed as a "cost reduction," with little (immediate) effect on their main business.
A corollary to this applies to physical locations, too: Remote sites will be closed before corporate headquarters will be, so pay attention to your job's location.
Besides, if you're not in the company's main business, you could develop a fabulous thing, and nobody at your company will appreciate it. (Think Xerox PARC. There are many examples at smaller scales.)
Retirement. Kids college education. Medical.
I have 3 kids. Estimating tuition (in a decade or two) at over 300k per child.
Retirement - how much do I want to live on? Candy bars were 20 cents when I was a kid. Now they're a dollar. What will food be when I retire? How much do I need saved up to live on?
Medical - We are all like ONE major medical disaster away from financial ruin, even with top-notch insurance. A rainy day fund is the difference between a roof over your head and living on the street. It will rain. It always rains eventually...
85k is not going to cut it unless you are really REALLY frugal and saving every possible cent.
was in leaving a job I loved to take a job that sucked but paid a lot more. 2 years of that job almost killed me.
Now on the other hand, if you're really serious, take a handful of people in the new company out to lunch. Buy them pizza, and talk to them. About life, interests, girlfriends, families, and see if they're a good fit. Don't talk to your bosses, talk to your peers in the new company, and the people who would work for you. That's the people who can help you make the decision.
If you love your job, you are the 1%. Most people dread going to work. A 10% bump in pay is not going to change that for the vast majority of them. Money is just money, happiness is a state of being. Not long ago, I was offered a 50% raise to leave my senior position at a small company to go work for a much larger one. Negotiations went well until the very end. In the "afterhour" when it was apparent the job was mine, I happened to ask about the desktop. Being a senior employee at a small company, I am accustomed to having vast flexibility. The norm is two desktops, one Linux and another Windows for testing, with a trio of monitors, plus a Mac laptop so all the major platforms can be tested. I was informed they run Windows XP, IT evaluates ALL hardware requests, and that is that. It was then I realized that trading guru status in a small company for being just another random coder at a large corporation would require a huge revision of expectations. In the end my family helped me decide that time with them (work at home now), happiness with my day to day computing experience, and overall flexibility was worth more then a 25% raise after taxes and commuting expenses.
Your situation is yours however, good luck, and I hope it works out well for you.
apt-get install redhat please god - Me (take it easy, I love Debian)
There's been plenty of work done studying it and it disagrees with your assertion. People who take counter-offers have lower job satisfaction, are less likely to be promoted and have a tendency to leave for a different company within a short window of accepting it. The only thing that is ridiculous is you thinking you can somehow make a definitive statement on this.
Having said that it doesn't mean that it is never beneficial to accept counter-offers, that every company is the same etc. One fundamental point is that many of the cases where the counter-offer worked out badly are where the person disliked their job, boss, company culture etc so simply adding more money didn't solve the underlying issue.
I just got a new boss (promoted from within our group) and I to him mentioned how companies treat engineering and software as a cost center - a necessary evil to be minimized. All my old bosses would agree. Sales people get a commission because they can say - look, if I didn't make THAT sale then THAT money wouldn't come in. Product development is so far removed from the money that it get's viewed quite differently. Now you can argue that if the sales guy didn't have THAT product that we designed and wrote code for, then THAT money wouldn't be here. Somehow that doesn't fly. So back to my new boss.... A few day later he came back and said fuck that "necessary evil" thing - I don't ever want here people say that. We're going to market our controls (my group does controls/algorithms and such) in terms the customers can understand and our business line people can understand. They're going to want our product because it performs better than the other guys because of what we do. We're going to sell what we do inside the company and out.
And you know, I have to agree with him. If you think IT is like maintenance - to be called when something is broken, then you will be considered a necessary evil. If you get on top of the issues and then start finding out how to proactively make your (internal) customers happy, you'll be viewed as an asset and treated with more respect, not as a drain on the company.