A fun place to work is, well... fun! But if you aren't happy (pay, commute, promotion, etc) then you aren't happy and soon you'll start to resent the fun place.

Take my advice, find a job you are happy with and make it the fun place!

It's the devil you know vs. the devil you don't. That's the hesitation, I'll bet.

I've changed jobs several times to find one that was more fun or closer to home. I've never had to choose between more fun and a shorter commute. I'd think about the commute and the entertainment value well before I thought about the money.

Don't forget that you spend a major part of your life there. Unless this is an "up or out" kind of situation, stay. 10% more money is not that much. And building up a team comes with a serious risk of failure, often by factors outside of your control.

Unless they are paying you drastically more (20 or 30%), stay with the place you enjoy. Hell, you could just move closer to your current job.

It is hard to find a job you enjoy with people you like to work with. If this new place has problems, personal as well as business side, you are screwed. It will be hard to find a "fun" job again.

What's more important, the people and culture at a job, or the opportunities that job presents for future growth?"

Money...otherwise, why would you bother to go to a job at all?

It all comes down to whether you think you will be happy with 10% more pay.

I've made similar leaps before for much greater increases and found the new company had some stuff under the carpet that I couldn't see until I was working there. If you choose to jump, jump carefully.

Also mind that you seem to be very happy with you current job and they seem to want to work with you. You *might* (be careful with this, use your own judgement here) tell your current boss that you have an offer in hand for 10% more and you are conflicted about the decision. You current boss *might* be willing to consider a pay nudge to keep you.

But of course, if you do this and get fired for looking over the fence, it is you own damned fault.

At 40, you should know by now that it isn't what your reward is, but how much you are enjoying it.

If a job offered me a 100% raise, but I had to commute an hour each way, I'd say no. My current commute is 7 minutes. That would mean I lose almost 2 hours of personal time in the evening every single day, and that is not worth doubling my salary to me. However, other people have different priorities for what they are looking to achieve.

If being closer to home and earning a little more money is more important to you and will bring you a greater sense of satisfaction and fulfillment than your current situation, then make the change. But if money isn't that important to you, you are "close enough" to home, and you are really happy at your current position, be sure you aren't just moving because "the grass is greener."

Somebody with those kinds of doubts doesn't really want to move. It's OK to stick with what you know. Just give yourself permission to be more concerned with security. Really. It's OK. A lot of people would love to be in your position. Yeah, somebody else might take job B, run with it, and make senior VP. They have no doubts; but if you try to do the Evil Kneival jump with doubts, you're gonna miss the ramp. When the jump is right, you won't even think about looking back, and you'll hit it just right.

You haven't finished explaining the algorithm

Flip a coin!
a) If you agree, great.
b) If you want to flip again, go for 2/3 or otherwise reconsider the rules, then you wanted the other decision.

Really, while the question is not short, there is still much data missing (how far is "further away", how fun is "fun", etc, etc.). There is no exact formula that can help.

I'd rather have a job I like that pays $70K (which is, practically speaking, about what I actually need to pay the bills, pay off debt and support my family) than a job I like that pays $45K and two part-time jobs I like that each pay $10K - which is what I have now.

There is absolutely something to be said for liking a job, but there's also something to be said for at least getting raises in line with inflation...

I agree. Maybe these days a 10-12% raise is all you can expect---if you are going to a similar job. That's not the case here. There should be a larger increase for the step up to director. 10-12% is a pittance for the risk and chaos of changing jobs, especially if the other job doesn't reach out and grab you. They probably think you are an amazing bargain at that salary.

It sounds like the new job is further away from your interests, compare:
"lead software engineer in a really fun company" vs.
"software is not what this company does primarily; ... the appreciation level would be much lower than my current position"
Faint praise for the other job.

Do you really want to be a director? With 'regulatory guidelines'? I'm strongly biased toward small companies, you can probably tell.

Steve

Fair enough.
My job pays enough, barely, but enough. That said I love my job. My boss is awesome, my co-workers are excellent, perks are decent.
I flatly refused offers (same company even) unless they had a minimum 20% premium above what I make now.
That's what a good job is worth to me.

If (in OP's case) it's closer to home and your commute costs saved + that 10% raise == 20% then I'd consider it (based wholly on my model).

To knowingly go into a job that sucked? only if I knew I was losing my good job, or the pay was 7 digits (absurd? sure, but that's what it costs to lease my soul. two years at that then I can retire if I do it right)
-nB.

Happiness = (Location) x (Pay) x (entertainment value or pleasantness of what you are doing)

try to normalize all inputs to a scale of 0 to 2, yielding a result ranging from 0 to 8. You will quickly see that any one thing can kill the whole deal (multiplying by 0 tends to do that), and that some things can only compensate for inadequacies to a limited extent. So... in a practical sense, this quantitative answer to such qualitative things as job pay, location, and how much you like what you are doing, might help make the analysis comparison easier. Tweaking this to fit your specific situation makes all the sense in the world. Good Luck!

I left a secure and extremely low-paying development/dba where I was the only programmer and got to call all the development shots to work in a dev team for a company that paid me 60% more than I was making at a previous company. In the year and a half I worked there, almost all the company's original founders were purged, we went through three directors of software engineering, two directors of qa, and two head product managers. The UX guy was ran off by a VP who wanted to do the usability themselves. And I had to serve under junior programmers who were only senior in the sense that they had been with the company for years, and every boneheaded thing they wanted to do was rubber-stamped by management. Project management for the desperately needed rewrite of the company's code was given to someone who had never done project management before. At some point development of that core product was transferred to an Indian offshore company to be worked on by programmers not familiar with the project's programming language; of course this didn't matter, because I wasn't doing very well at this company because I wasn't invited meetings where important architectural details were being discussed (which I was nevertheless responsible for implementing even though no one told me about them). The company was owned by a private equity firm, whose goal all along was probably reducing headcount and maximizing short term profit at the cost of large employee turnover and bad code. So looking back at my situation, I'm really not surprised at all that it happened.

Was this experience worth the 60% pay increase? I supposed I learned how to not run a software company, which might be valuable in the future. But my advice is to look for warning signs that might indicate that the new company might be extremely dysfunctional. Warning signs like the company being owned by a private equity firm, or all the founders of the business who made it great being purged, or lots of turnover among senior engineers and a dev mix made up of recent college grads and mediocre lifers who coast on their seniority. And try to figure out if possible why the previous guy left.

What are your drivers?

If you enjoy making software, and maybe running a team, then don't switch.

If you enjoy not knowing what's coming, dynamic situations with lots of change, and continually dealing with things that you haven't dealt with before, then change.

The money difference is not a big inducement, I'd say. Especially since you don't say how this new company will be funded - so you may be buying into 6 months of salary at 10% more, and then no job.

If after that you do think you are still interested in the job, it's really important to ask what you will control. If the big decisions are already made, and you are just a caretaker, then think twice as hard. Check how much budget you have. Check the constraints you'd be under. Check when you have to deliver software, and decide how viable it is. And ask for shares. A directorship without ownership is a fantastic way to load legal responsibility onto someone without the benefits of that responsibility. Culture of a company is important, what are your co-directors like? You'll set the tone for the people in your department - if you think they don't fit in, you'll be able to lose them - so that part of culture the culture is less important. The hat you wear as a director is completely different from making software; it's as table-tennis is to riding a bike.

Yep, I've done it. But it absolutely wouldn't be for everyone. Do the things that make you happy.

Where they pointed out people were happiest at either 75K or 85K

Travel. Nothing would make me sadder than watching my kids turn into insular jingoist xenophobes like their classmates. The only way I know of guaranteeing that that doesn't happen is to haul them around the world and let them loose. It's an expensive education, but it's worth every penny.

Granted, ignorance is bliss. If I had never known what is out there, I wouldn't care, and certainly wouldn't spend so much on airfare for my family.

It's the devil you know vs. the devil you don't.

That's the situation I was in a couple years ago. Got an offer from a startup-type place at a significant pay increase from my current stable job. After much hemming and hawing, I finally decided to take it... however when I went to give notice, my old employer volunteered a counteroffer... so I stayed, and got the best of both worlds.

To the OP, you might just tell your current boss that you're thinking about leaving and see what he says. His answer, either way, will help you decide what to do.

The red flag for me was,

I've always tried to be in companies in which what I did was directly tied to the company's main business. There is an analogy to a river: You want to be in the main stream, not in some backwater, so that when things get tight and money dries up, you're not left high and dry -- as in, a department or division that can be conveniently closed as a "cost reduction," with little (immediate) effect on their main business.

A corollary to this applies to physical locations, too: Remote sites will be closed before corporate headquarters will be, so pay attention to your job's location.

Besides, if you're not in the company's main business, you could develop a fabulous thing, and nobody at your company will appreciate it. (Think Xerox PARC. There are many examples at smaller scales.)

Retirement. Kids college education. Medical.

I have 3 kids. Estimating tuition (in a decade or two) at over 300k per child.

Retirement - how much do I want to live on? Candy bars were 20 cents when I was a kid. Now they're a dollar. What will food be when I retire? How much do I need saved up to live on?

Medical - We are all like ONE major medical disaster away from financial ruin, even with top-notch insurance. A rainy day fund is the difference between a roof over your head and living on the street. It will rain. It always rains eventually...

85k is not going to cut it unless you are really REALLY frugal and saving every possible cent.

It's not just more pay, though. It's an upgrade in title. While that isn't that important in the grand scheme of day-to-day, when you go for the NEXT job, being a director has different implications than being a lead engineer. The next company will be more likely to hire you in at a management level instead of an IC level.......which usually entails more pay / perks.

Working hard now so you can have fun later is a gamble. Having a stroke or getting hit by a bus means you miss out on your retirement. Besides too much of a good thing tends to diminish the enjoyment of it. Too much free time can become boredom. Spread out your enjoyment over the long haul. From your first day, until you die. Rather than only from from retirement to death, which I think can be an unpredictably short amount of time.

Absolutely! You'll be hating life if you have a rotten job, no matter what it pays.

Some might think that saving their marriages, feeding their families, paying off debts, and the great difficulty of getting another job in a terrible economy (seems the economy is always terrible), and the like are reasons to put up with the job from Hell. Be stoic about it. No. Saw one damned fool who got married on the understanding that he had to have a steady job. She hit him with a prenup 2 weeks before the wedding. Told him to sign or the wedding was off. He signed. He was doing anything to keep his job. Anything. Yet the things he did to keep his job, things like framing others for his mistakes, repeatedly trying to snow customers with loads of bull, bullying and browbeating underlings, sabotaging anyone who might show him up whether or not that was intended, and general dirty office politicking but assured that he would be fired, as eventually did happen. He understood that, but could not bring himself to act differently, he was so afraid. I don't know what happened to his marriage.

was in leaving a job I loved to take a job that sucked but paid a lot more. 2 years of that job almost killed me.

Now on the other hand, if you're really serious, take a handful of people in the new company out to lunch. Buy them pizza, and talk to them. About life, interests, girlfriends, families, and see if they're a good fit. Don't talk to your bosses, talk to your peers in the new company, and the people who would work for you. That's the people who can help you make the decision.

If I had a choice of working where the software was the product the company was selling (and I'm not quite sure that this is the case in your current job, but seems to be more so based on what you said) or working where IT and software development is a cost center, I'd pick the former every time. I once worked at at place (Dir. of Software Development) and guess who was treated the best and made the most money: Sales or IT?

We were a necessary drain on the company, at least that's how upper management viewed it. They couldn't see that with no IT infrastructure, including the code we developed that the whole company ran on, there would be no sales.

Just food for thought there......

If you love your job, you are the 1%. Most people dread going to work. A 10% bump in pay is not going to change that for the vast majority of them. Money is just money, happiness is a state of being. Not long ago, I was offered a 50% raise to leave my senior position at a small company to go work for a much larger one. Negotiations went well until the very end. In the "afterhour" when it was apparent the job was mine, I happened to ask about the desktop. Being a senior employee at a small company, I am accustomed to having vast flexibility. The norm is two desktops, one Linux and another Windows for testing, with a trio of monitors, plus a Mac laptop so all the major platforms can be tested. I was informed they run Windows XP, IT evaluates ALL hardware requests, and that is that. It was then I realized that trading guru status in a small company for being just another random coder at a large corporation would require a huge revision of expectations. In the end my family helped me decide that time with them (work at home now), happiness with my day to day computing experience, and overall flexibility was worth more then a 25% raise after taxes and commuting expenses.

Your situation is yours however, good luck, and I hope it works out well for you.

Faulty logic. The time you save is the time at the end of your life, not the time when you're young and can do things. In short, not all time is equal.

This is ridiculous, unless you like work for the mafia or something.

There's been plenty of work done studying it and it disagrees with your assertion. People who take counter-offers have lower job satisfaction, are less likely to be promoted and have a tendency to leave for a different company within a short window of accepting it. The only thing that is ridiculous is you thinking you can somehow make a definitive statement on this.

Having said that it doesn't mean that it is never beneficial to accept counter-offers, that every company is the same etc. One fundamental point is that many of the cases where the counter-offer worked out badly are where the person disliked their job, boss, company culture etc so simply adding more money didn't solve the underlying issue.

That's ridiculous. Studies have found that lots of things bring long term happiness including Money [wikipedia.org], Marriage [sciencedaily.com], Social ties [springerlink.com] among many others.

We were a necessary drain on the company, at least that's how upper management viewed it.

I just got a new boss (promoted from within our group) and I to him mentioned how companies treat engineering and software as a cost center - a necessary evil to be minimized. All my old bosses would agree. Sales people get a commission because they can say - look, if I didn't make THAT sale then THAT money wouldn't come in. Product development is so far removed from the money that it get's viewed quite differently. Now you can argue that if the sales guy didn't have THAT product that we designed and wrote code for, then THAT money wouldn't be here. Somehow that doesn't fly. So back to my new boss.... A few day later he came back and said fuck that "necessary evil" thing - I don't ever want here people say that. We're going to market our controls (my group does controls/algorithms and such) in terms the customers can understand and our business line people can understand. They're going to want our product because it performs better than the other guys because of what we do. We're going to sell what we do inside the company and out.

And you know, I have to agree with him. If you think IT is like maintenance - to be called when something is broken, then you will be considered a necessary evil. If you get on top of the issues and then start finding out how to proactively make your (internal) customers happy, you'll be viewed as an asset and treated with more respect, not as a drain on the company.