Telling my Grade book to go to hell

I’ve been faced with an unwanted but generally desirable problem: which job should I take?

I was unexpectedly catapulted into the job market back at the beginning of March. I spent a week licking my wounds, a week shining my resume up, then four weeks running through the interview gauntlet.

I came out of this with two job offers: one for a position that wasn’t quite what I wanted, but was at an awesome internet company. The other one was at an airline training company and the position was closer to what I wanted and was closer to what I’ve done in the past at Chiquita. It was quite likely that the offer from the training company would pay significantly more than the internet company.

There was one snag with this, the position at the airline training company had not technically been offered to me yet, but I had information that it would be offered to me. However, the position at the internet company had to start before the training company could give me an offer. I had already delayed the internet company once, and I needed to start a job, so I started at the internet company with the intention of quitting when I received an offer from the training company.

So, I waited for an offer from the training company.

And I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited for almost three weeks, which actually got me to the end of the training class at the internet company, when I received an offer from the airline training company.

The offer was far less than I thought it would be.

During my period of waiting, I had grown to like the work environment at the internet company and I became conflicted about leaving there. So I put together a decision tool of pros and cons for each position and visually weighted them. When I got the job offer from the training company I tinkered with the decision tool a bit and adjusted it.

I still felt uneasy about the state of the tool, so I put in some harder numbers as to cost savings that I’d have at the internet company but not at the training company. I also did some research inquiring about promotion opportunities at both employers and doing some first hand research on the commute to the training company. (I am quite decided that my main commutes will be by public transit for all of my future positions. Cars are just too expensive.)

The purely financial considerations of the positions clearly pointed towards accepting the position at the training company, with a net gain over the internet company as large as $9,000 per year. (The internet company has a performance based bonus program, so my compensation there can vary.)

I cannot lucidly cover all of the considerations that came into play, but it honestly came down to a decision of how much money would it take for me to sacrifice following my values. Some of this comes back to why I think I decided to move to Seattle:

• I wanted to live in a dense area where work, home and shopping were close together.
• I wanted to work at a company that was a leader in its field, and able to move aggressively, but not recklessly.
• I wanted to work somewhere with a very diverse employee population.
• I wanted work somewhere where the quality of my work was judged, not the fact that I had bleached my hair.

I really fiddled with the decision tool to find a way I could make the financials come out to be clearly positive for the internet company, and under the best case scenario that would happen. But everything has to fall perfectly for that to happen, and while I think it can happen, I wouldn’t place a bet on it.

So my gradebook, the decision tool, pointed toward the training company. Then I remembered something one my favorite professors in college would often say, “Sometimes I like to tell my gradebook to go to hell.”

I took several classes from that professor and he would give the same speech on the first day of every term. The example he usually gave was the student who had a high B (we didn’t do plusses or minuses) and had put significant effort into the class, in these cases he would tell his gradebook to go to hell and give the student an A; the intangibles can and should override cold hard facts.

Leaders who do not understand that are not worth their weight in lead. The decision that is most cost effective is not always the right one, it takes courage and vision to realize this and follow through on it.

So I told my gradebook to go to hell and I’m staying at the internet company. Its a leap, but one that I feel comfortable with, and I believe I’m making the right decision for the long term, even if in the short term doesn’t appear that way.