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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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?
Well, about fifteen years ago I kind of got tricked on something like this. I showed up at this job with an attitude of "I will work very hard but also be aggressively gay until you fire me for being gay," which sounds weird but my employer at the time had a policy of firing people for being openly gay which wasn't just legal, but actually specifically approved by the President of the United States. By the time I figured out my organization wasn't actually obeying the policy, and in fact mostly used it to get rid of low performing homosexuals and as a convenient escape hatch for people of any orientation who wanted to quit without the negative consequences outlined in their employment contracts, which included imprisonment, it had been almost three years and I felt like I had basically been conned into working harder than at any previous job.
I coasted for a little over a year, but only because I couldn't quit without being thrown in jail. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed about a year after I got out. For subsequent jobs, I went back to my previous policy of taking an entry level position, performing better than most entry-level hires for about a year, then losing interest and quitting without giving notice.
Obviously, I wouldn't have posted this if you'd specified in your post that you wanted useful advice for your situation instead of expressing curiosity in general, since we obviously have very different goals in life; but on the Motte, how one phrases the question will affect the answers one receives. ;-P
But in all seriousness, I would strongly second @Walterodim 's advice about placing cultural fit with the company above monetary compensation. I once moved from a hotel company to a bank for more money and it was a huge mistake. Going from $12.50 per hour to $14 for similar low-level call center duties is very different from the offers you'll be facing quantitatively, but qualitatively similar to what Walter outlines--but I went from enjoying my work and co-workers to being deeply unhappy with the work and consequently unpleasant to otherwise likable people, even though the job description was virtually identical.
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