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Wellness Wednesday for October 18, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm entertaining a few different job offers at the moment and curious to see how others here might handle negotiations. What equations do you use to compare compensation packages across disparate elements? For example, how do you decide whether net-gain in take-home pay is worth losing a few days of vacation. How do you measure the dollar value of a telework day? How do you price in a commute aside from the costs of gas?

Since your relative preference for those factors is probably somewhat subjective, I would argue there isn't really any advantage to a very complex model. Assuming the offers are somewhat similar, you can probably just use a linear model and assign coefficients to roughly match your preference. Kind of like a decision matrix or this example. I would just put everything in dollar units since that's probably the actual thing that's up for negotiation. Then negotiate for the highest dollar equivalent compensation. The whole exercise uses an absurdly simplistic model with made up numbers, but is probably more accurate than just winging it. It's not even very wrong, in the sense that you can expand most reasonable functions with a first order Taylor series in the relevant variables about the point of interest.