Excellent question. Both companies have a good reputation for honoring employees’ woe life balance and not expecting long hours from them.
You put in 80 hours in nine days. Monday-Thursday you work 9 hours. One Friday you work an 8 hour day, the next Friday you have off.
Maybe this tells us all you need to know!
Those are all valid points. Another one I’d add is that with the company further from home, I’d need to leave for work earlier than I’d ideally like to, so that I’m on the road before traffic gets too heavy. That’s not a concern with Company 1.
I think the biggest thing making me hesitate is just the lack of options. If I try out the new schedule and it really is a bad fit, I can’t request to switch over to a different schedule. If I reject Company 2, I’ll have rejected an offer of direct employment twice, so they may not be inclined to keep giving me offers, and the job market is so brutal right now that I’d probably be stuck there for a while.
So I’m thinking Company 1 sounds like the better deal:
- Better location / commute
- Work you enjoy
- Less abstract. I hear a lot of “potentially” and “opportunities” as opposed to “here’s what we are hiring you for”.
You may be pulled towards Company 2 because you’ve been working with them. Devil you know and whatnot. But I would suggest looking at both objectively (particularly since you’ll be working with a new manager anyway).
Call me cynical, but I’ve worked for enough startups and “high growth” companies and teams that I’m less concerned about whatever glorious bullshit “might” happen x months down the line. Whatever job you take, assume that whatever that job is on Day 1 is “the job” until it actually isn’t.
Is there a chance you could work for #2 as a contractor not full time but on a piecework (and remote) basis? That could help them manage peaks in their workload, preserve your working relationship with them, and allow you to accept the position with #1. Of course, when they contract with you for a job, you could be busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, but if you choose those contract assignments carefully, they could be short and/or manageable.
You hit the nail on the head. I think that’s exactly what’s going on. I think Company 1 is objectively the better fit, but Company 2 is more familiar – and I’ve heard plenty of stories from people who turned down opportunities that I thought they should have taken, because they were scared. I will add that objectively, my last job was way, way better than the one before it, but I was anxious to step away from what was familiar there as well. I’m ultimately glad I did, even though there were some ways in which the old job was better.
I am leaning towards Company 1 as well, and have put some thought into how to rearrange my schedule to fit in everything I want to do at least some days of the work week.
I don’t think I would want to. Since I already feel intimidated by having to figure out a new schedule, new work, etc., I wouldn’t want the added stress of another job. Plus they probably wouldn’t like it since Company 1 and Company 2 are competitors.
If that’s the case, trying to do what I suggest might get you fired! Never mind!
This reminds me of the time my son was choosing colleges and he had cut it down to 2, call them H and T. So he flipped a coin and it came up T. He decided to make it 2 of 3 and flipped twice more; still T. Rinse and repeat once or twice. Finally, I pointed out that this meant he really preferred H and that was his choice.
The point is that the OP probably already has a choice; he just has to find out what it is.
Yep.
I’ve commented several times over the
years about my method for tough binary decisions:
- Flip a coin.
- Pay attention to your instantaneous emotional reaction to the outcome.
- If you’re happy, choose what the coin said. If unhappy, choose the opposite.
It’s a technique to collapse the superpostion of your indecisive wavefunction.
Having a great manager makes all the difference. Your friend at C2 says this person is the best manager they’e ever had.
The 9/80 and the commute negate each other, so they’re not determinative.
I’d definitely work for C2.
Well, I ended up going with Company 2. The OP laid out a framework of the salaries being equal, but Company 2 countered with an extra 15k, and Company 1 couldn’t match it.
About an hour after I received the counter-offer, my friend who referred me to the position texted me asking me which job I had taken. I told him we were still in negotiations, and also told him my concerns about the position not being well-defined. For context, I started at this company in a position created for me. When I started, I struggled with having enough visibility into what was going on on the team to figure out where I could help out, and my manager wasn’t tasking me with much, either.
My friend, who has worked for both my old manager and this new manager, assured me that the struggles I had when starting a few years back were due to the management style of my old manager, and that this should not be a problem with the new manager. He said, and I quote,
“If it’s direct to <new manager,> you’re fine. underutilizes players/rovers that are direct to him. Which can (usually does) leave the person a little adrift. is much better about that. He says on top of what it is that you’re tasked to do. He’ll let you tell him if you feel overloaded, and he’ll follow through on making sure that the lists and dates are clear. He’s much more intentional about what is being asked of the team vs. what does the team have the capacity for.”
I also think this is the better schedule. One day off every two weeks would be nice, but I ultimately think two days remote each week is going to give me more breathing room than the job that was fully in office would.
Congrats!!! 
Thank you!
Hooray! Here’s to several happy years there. 
Very good - money is always a very reasonable tipping point. It may not buy happiness, but it sure does help take the sting out of minor annoyances. More importantly having had bosses shitty, indifferent and good, good can make quite a difference.
You had no bad choices, so this was going to be a reasonable outcome either way. But still, congratulations 
An extra $15k buys a lot of rationalization when you’re sitting in traffic! I probably would have done the same.
One thing that would have gone into my calculus and which I don’t think you mentioned is whether you viewed either of these jobs as The One From Which You’ll Retire. If you saw either (or both) of them as permanent, it hits different than if you considered them for 3-5 years then on to another job.
Both companies are big enough that many people spend their whole careers there. But that’s not really part of my calculus.
I know the OP has some WFH mixed in. But assuming not for simplicity …
A standard work year is 50 weeks times 5 days = 250 days. $15,000 / 250 days = $60/day. That’s gross; after taxes, medical, and 401K, probably about $40 net.
That raise pays $20 per commute in to work and $20 per commute home. As I noted upthread, the IRS mileage rate is $0.76/mile in 2026 and is a decent, albeit low-ball, figure for the total cost of operation of an average generic car. At that rate the extra $20 each way is enough to offset a 26 mile one-way commute. If the commute is only 13 miles each way, then you’re spending half your extra money on driving and the other half, $10 each way, is available to assuage your stress.
For sure, far better to have the $15K than to not have it. But it isn’t a purely free lunch in this case.