Re: Money vs. Perl

[johndageek]

What is your long term plan?

Your career pay scale is a lot like compound interest. Since most employers you work for will give you a percentage raise each year. Below is an example that does not take into account things like pay jumps for changing jobs, or bonus pay. (remember bonus pay is a one time thing, pay raises keep on giving, because they are compounded)

Start pay |	Years worked |	pay rate with annual 3% raise
15K	20	$27,091
20K	20	$36,122
25K	20	$45,152
30K	20	$54,183

This is not to say you should forgo happiness for money, but if you can get your pay rate up earlier in your career, it will tend to stay higher overall.

No amount of money is worth being miserable for. Also integrity means something, your choice to stay with your current job because you have just taken it is a good idea. At one point in my career I decided to move (due to a variety of reasons, low pay being one of them). Found a new employer agreed to terms and accepted the position. Turned in notice to the president of the company, he accepted it. 2 days later Corporate owners offered close to 30K pay increase to stay. I turned it down, and went to the corporate president to ask what the heck this was about, his statement: “I told them not to bother trying, because your word is good”.

Some employers are better than others, some will take advantage of you every way they can, others will be more fair (but remember they are in the business of making money). Some also have integrity when dealing with you, others do not. You must choose how you will deal with employers in your life.

Good luck!

[tilly]

It is good that you turned down the counter-offer. Never accept counter-offers. If you accept one, sure it may look tempting, but now they know you're dissatisfied and will never trust you again. One way or another you'll find yourself gone within 6 months, under worse circumstances than if you'd left immediately.

[Tanktalus]

In johndageek's reply, he mentioned that he had already accepted the new offer before tendering his resignation. Since that acceptance usually involves signing something, I would agree - quitting a job you haven't even started is crazy.

That said, does anyone have the converse experience where they have an offer, have not yet accepted it, tender their resignation and get a counter offer? I'd love to hear those experiences, how they worked out (whether taking the counter or not). Personally, I think my boss realises that I'm looking out for my own best interest^1,2, thus would never trust me less just because I got another offer, and my current employer had to counter offer to keep me. But I may be deluding myself - stories to help convince me either way would be appreciated :-)

¹ I moved about 2.5 years ago. I don't mean a move across town. I mean a move two timezones away. It took us over 30 hours of driving to get to our new home. When I told my boss this was what I wanted to do, we worked out an arrangement to make both of us happy. He did raise one concern: that once I got here, I'd be looking for other employment. I told him that as long as I was getting a better deal with them, there was no point to looking elsewhere (I do work for a relatively large company). Of course, being 2.5 years later now, if he didn't trust completely at that time, he probably does now.

² I make no qualms that the only reason why I want to make high-quality software is not to make customers happy or ecstatic or any silly buzz term, but to keep the customers from calling for support. This, in turn, will reduce the amount of my time that support takes from me in solving customer problems. The more time I spend on support, the less time I have to work on the next version of our off-the-shelf software. The less time I have to spend on the next version, the less productive I am. The less productive I am, the worse my yearly review. And my yearly review translates directly (at least in this company) to yearly bonus and the yearly salary review. This is not about the customer. This is about my take-home pay. As of yet, my management structure has had no problems with this. In fact, I'm betting they wish others would take the same cause-and-effect view of their own contribution to the product. :-)

[tilly]

I think you're deluding yourself. Read an article or two on counter-offers to see that, even though it looks tempting, accepting one is generally a bad idea.