Saturday, November 7, 2015

Why I Gave Up a High Salary for a Lower One

In life, we have to make decisions that aren't just about us. Sometimes we have to think outside of the box and bigger than ourselves. For me, this was my family. I accepted a job working from home, nearly 100% of the time, also called a telecommute or remote position, doing the same work that I was commuting one and a half hours each direction. Spending 11 - 12 hours a day away from them was not really a good thing. Sure, I was making big money, but at the expense of my relationship with my family. Giving up a 15% of my salary is expensive, but alimony and child support are even more expensive. The cost of repairing my car and lost work after an auto accident last year are also were very high.

I also believe that making this move will allow us, between my wife and I, to actually increase our earnings potential by not incurring costs for childcare so that my wife and I can both be working, even if her work is part-time. I also get to do software and infrastructure projects on the latest cloud offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. At my previous position, I was pretty much locked in to SharePoint 2010, and the customer made a decision to migrate to a cloud instance of SharePoint 2010, putting more nails in the coffin of innovation for this customer. The customer wanted to get out of the business of running on-premise application hosting, for cost savings. They're learning that there are many challenges to doing this and ultimately, they're going to have to give up some of their most important functionality if they want to completely transition to cloud SharePoint, where all they're getting is a site collection... no event receivers, no timer jobs.

As a recruiter, you should encourage your hiring managers to move in the direction of telecommuting whenever possible. This leads to better opportunities for your workers at a cheaper cost to your company because workers are willing to accept lower salaries for jobs that they don't have to drive to. The cost of electricity for powering workstation computing resources also shifts from the employer to the employee, a cost most sane people would accept in the name of saving gasoline and the inherent risks involved in driving.

I also get to pursue other professional interests having nothing to do with technology. I have an intense interest in Thoroughbred horse racing and pedigree analysis. Because I'm not spending all my time driving, I have an extra 2 -3 hours every day to explore these things. What could be better than having a backup plan?


1 comment:

  1. Jared, I'm going to write a blog post on 'Why I gave up a Lower Salary job for a Higher One'

    - TL

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