Ask HN: What job offers have you turned down and why?

So I've walked away from jobs where it was clear I wouldn't have work/life balance.

E.g. one company told me: "We don't want to, but we're working 50/60 hour weeks. We had everything planned out and then a big customer had a big feature request and it blew through our schedules."

Good planning involves setting goals, but also making sure you have time and resources available to deal with unexpected problems, because there will be unexpected problems. To lose one weekend to an emergency may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose all of them looks like carelessness. And I didn't want to be working long hours because of what was clearly bad planning.

(Sometimes you can catch warning signs in advance: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/10/14/job-you-dont-hate/)

Through my network an opportunity had come up for a "next move" in NYC.

Went for lunch with the CEO. He was less than pleasant, bordering on rude, with the waitress and left a poor tip. Both unwarranted from my perspective. I found the service to be just fine.

While the compensation and the work I had to look forward to both suited my requirements, I opted to look elsewhere after observing this red flag.

One was an early stage YC company that lowballed me, offered me 90K + 10,000 options (or something equally worthless). I attempted to negotiate (I was making 115K + vested stock in public company at the time) and the CEO told me I was an idiot for not accepting it "because the equity was worth way more than the salary." They're still around, but as far as I can tell, not making a ton of progress on their exit. I see their job ads on here all the time. I wound up turning down the offer because it was a lowball and also because the CEO revealed himself to be a total dick. Really glad I missed that one.

Another was a company where I applied for one position. I walked in the door for the interview, they started asking me questions, and I realized they were interviewing me for a different position. At that point, I kind of mentally checked out and decided I'd use this as an opportunity to practice my interviewing skills and instead of being interviewed, I pretended I was interviewing them. Halfway through, I told the recruiter (who came to check up on me) that I had to leave early, and she convinced me to stick around for one more interview. They knocked everyone else off the list and brought in the CTO, and then halfway through that the CEO comes in and says, "Look, we like you, we want you to work for us." They made me a pretty solid offer (about 20K more than I was making at the time).. Unfortunately, it wasn't a position I neither wanted nor was willing to take. I declined politely. They thought I was negotiating, but I really had to put my foot down and say "thanks but no thanks."

I initially felt bad about turning it down, but after I declined the offer, they told me so many blatant lies about the position that I quickly realized it wasn't the place for me.

I once got two competing offers from two different companies. One of them I liked a lot, the other paid more. I countered with the first one, and he said he'd match salary but couldn't match benefits (no health insurance). He swore up and down that if I got the job, he'd get health insurance, but I just didn't believe him, so I wound up having to accept the second offer. That's not the kind of perk you spend company money on because one employee asked for it.

Finally, I got another offer from yet another company. I was prepared to accept the offer, when I heard through the grapevine that the manager that hired me had decided to quit and his last day would be the day I started. I noped out of that one, fast.

Fun times.

* Excessive commute

* Lack of flexible working

* Lack of remote working

* Poor office space

* Lack of free parking

* No showers (important if you cycle in)

* Gut feeling was not good

It's not usually just one of the above, but some combination of weighted factors.

Funnily enough I don't think I have ever turned down a job because of the money, or taken a job just because of the money, I'm far more interested in work-life balance - cutting out the commute has always added massively to my general well-being.

Ended up taking a job in Denver as a software engineer. The other options were applications engineering positions, one for Seagate and one for Western Digital.

WD wanted me to work in California for only 1k more than I was offered to be a software engineer in Denver. I countered by asking for 20% more and they said no.

Seagate wanted me to move to Minnesota, which was lackluster for other reasons, namely winter temperatures.

First Jump.

I was with company A which offered me 9 L INR. I wanted an opportunity to work in USA or hit the 12 L INR in India.

<TURNED DOWN> I got 11L INR from B.

<TURNED DOWN> I got 12L INR from another flight ticket management company (forgot its name) (product based company).

I got 9L INR from a IT services company and they promised to process my H1B in the upcoming cycle.

I picked the H1B one.

Second Jump.

I got 105K USD from a telecom giant in USA on 2.5 year contract and my employer was a major staffing company in USA and they promised to process GC immediately after joining.

<TURNED DOWN> I got 125 K USD from a small consultancy and client would be an Airlines. It was a contract to hire position. In Texas, but i din have good reviews about the consultancy and they may compromise on visa and may not be able to take my GC thru and i had doubts if they can even pay properly.

I picked the 105K USD one.

What do you folks think, am i making good decisions of totally horrible ones?

And I found out later that this was kind of a scam, where they tried to have engineers working on their assembly line. It wasn't easy to get moved into engineering off of that line.

The company was decades old and hadn't changed tooling or technology for most of that time. The senior developers were actively fighting the adoption of modern FOSS tooling. Several were still using CRT monitors.

No amount of money would have made that position look attractive.

It's sad. It sounded really interesting, and they were very understanding, and yet, for whatever reason, they wouldn't budge.

* Poor work culture

* Lack of opportunities to learn at work

* Not a competitive pay

* Dated tech-stack

* Sensing toxic work atmosphere

* Company ridden with ivy-league grads that it boasts of during the course of interview. Sure-shot path to 2nd grade treatment should you join such place because it's not your knowledge that they see but only your certificates. [Confession: I learned this a hard way :(]

Living in a big, private house, on a small island with only one traffic light in a multi million city, in ground heated pool, etc... and working from home...

No money/stock options can compensate for this, if I have to move elsewhere in North America...

Last offer was to move to NYC :-)

For Joining online training batches please feel free to call us @ +91-9066638196