Passion over Profits

Summary

I’m a little over 4 months into the new job and I think now it’s safe to talk about a topic that’s been fermenting in my head without risk of jinxing anything at this point.This last time around finding a new job was the first time in the 15 years of my career where multiple offers have actually lined up in spacetime such that I had to decide between them. I’m sure I could have made this happen before if that was the goal but I’ve always tried to be selective with the companies I apply to. As everyone has already told you I’m sure, this is a great position to be in when negotiating your offer.After a few back and forths with each company I felt pretty good about what each was offering, but on paper one was pretty stackedOffer 1Offer 2SalaryBaselineBaseline plus even more than a minimum wage salaryEquitySome shares, but no near term timeline for any valueStrong chance the company will go public within the year and result in a 100k payoutBonusNone5-10% Annual bonusTitleSenior EngineerStaff EngineerCommuteHybridFully RemoteTeamSolid group of really smart engineersWorking on “the best dev team the company has”And to top it all off, Offer 2 had company offsite coming up I’d be invited to in the Bahamas!Just looking at them side by side, Offer 2 won on pretty much every aspect you can think of.But I still ended up turning it down.There was one thing I was missing from Offer 2 and had in abundance for Offer 1: Passion. As you might know from my other post, Offer 1 was Commonwealth Fusion Systems where I get to work with insanely talented and smart people pushing the frontier of science to try and accomplish something humanity has never done before. I’m so much more passionate about working on futuristic tech solutions to climate change than the normal sort of business that Offer 2 would have me work on. After a certain point, mo’ money don’t mean mo’ happiness. So to think of it another way, by turning down the extra money I effectively bought happiness with money that wou...