So, for mental health reasons, I’ve decided to not take a job I’ve been offered. I feel horrible about it, because I know it would be a great one to have for my field. I want to take the job, but I know its location would require a lot of stress and other issues to deal with. I feel too much loyalty to the community I’m in now, and love my job within it, even if it’s not as related to my field.
Anyone else have similar stories they want to share?
When I was in college, I had to turn down a summer job working for a moving company. They called me and offered the job about 2 days after I fell off a skateboard and separated my shoulder. I was bummed - it sounded like a fun job with a fair amount of travel.
Not long out of law school, I interviewed for (twice) and was offered a job as a child support enforcement lawyer in a podunk town. When they offered me the job, I sat down with a notepad and listed the pros and cons, and discussed it at some length with my wife. When I really thought it through, I realized I didn’t want the job THAT much, didn’t particularly want to live in that area, and thought it likely that I’d be getting an offer for a much more interesting job (for which I’d already applied) within the next six months, so I turned them down.
Sure enough, that second offer came along pretty much right on schedule. I was very lucky. And I’ve never regretted turning down the first gig.
I was offered a great job in IT at Cornell University, about three hours from Schenectady. I nailed the interview (the interviewer had actually read my book) and knew I was going to get the job.
Trouble was, the very first thing I asked at the interview was the salary. It wasn’t enough for me to pull up stakes and sell my house, much as I would have loved to have worked there. I had to turn them down.
I was offered a great job in a totally perfect location, at a company where a good friend was working (my current job is awesome, but I don’t have close friends here, and it’s in an okay but not perfect location), and I might have taken it except that a) I loved my current job, which was very employee-friendly, and had a hard time thinking of leaving it for an unknown, and b) they’d been bought out recently, and I was concerned about what changes that might make in the working environment. a) might not be a good reason (I’m really risk-averse, to the point where it’s probably not entirely healthy) but a) and b) together were enough to make me decide not to take it.
Fast forward several years. The company I was looking at had a bunch of layoffs. The last I heard, my friend wasn’t working there anymore.
I was offered a great job with a book distributor and small publishing house right out of college. The book industry is really hard to break into - and honestly, I wasn’t even really trying to break into it, I was referred by the agency I was using. It involved coordinating the events at book fairs and shows - and perhaps some editing and acquisitions over time.
It also was the worst pay I’d ever seen for a professional job - McDonalds was paying more at the time. There was no way I could support myself off that. It was a great job for someone whose spouse had a “real job” or someone so desperate to get into publishing that they were willing to work two jobs.
When I turned the job down, I was regretful…right until the hiring manager boo-hoo’d my salary concerns with “we have people applying with Masters degrees who will be happy to take this job.” “Hire them then, why bother with me.”
Back in 2002? 2003? I was offered a job as a network admin for a small company in Maine. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t formally trained for that particular job, nor that I didn’t have any real world experience in it. The guy offering it to me was impressed by my level head, my ability to adapt to change, and my ability to quickly learn what I needed to learn.
I could wear what I want as long as it was legal, I would start out at $32k with 401k, decent health/dental/vision insurance, and would get a major raise as soon as I took the classes I needed to do the job, which the company would pay for. I’d answer directly to the owner of the company. Basically it was my dream job.
The only reason I didn’t take it was because I didn’t want to move that far from my family.
If I had to do it over again, I’d take the job in a heartbeat.
I was recently offered a job in Saudi Arabia. When I heard the offer in detail I laughed in the guy’s face.
When I was working as a theatrical lighting technician I got an offer to spend 3 months in India with a small dance company.
I couldn’t do it. I actually had something resembling full-time employment when I got this offer and didn’t want to give it up. But even now, 30 years or so later, I sometime wish I’d made a different decision.
I had a very similar experience about a year ago - I was working in a (very boring) government job, and I had an offer to open up a nonprofit’s new office in Small Town, Texas. I was very close to taking it - but I hated the idea of leaving Washington, and moving to Small Town made it even worse. As a friend put it, “It sounds like you’d be trading a dreadfully boring job and decent life outside of work for a great job and soul-crushing boredom outside of the office.” Between that, and the fact I thought that I’d be getting another offer, I decided to turn down the Texas position.
Mistake. I’m still in the boring government job - no better offers materialized, and I’m still applying for work. Given the same choice now, I’d take the Texas job in a heartbeat.
I’d be very interested in those details. Bad pay? Dangerous conditions? Ridiculous workplace rules? Oppressive social climate?
While I was waiting to hear back from law schools I was offered a summer position as Riding Director for the sleepaway summer camp I attended all through my childhood and teenaged years. They even said I could have my own cabin and bring my cats (neither is normally allowed). I really wanted to do it. The camp’s in a beautiful setting and the riding program is pretty basic and frankly not that much work (at the time I was live-in barn manager at on a horse farm/riding program).
I had to turn them down because they needed to know by a certain point, and at that point my school plans were still too uncertain for me to commit 
I still regret it didn’t work out; it wouldn’t have been a ton of money but I didn’t have anything else lined up and it would have been a really special summer… the chance won’t come again.
I was temping and had been temping for a long, long time, in various departments within one company. One department manager had gone so far as to promise me a permanent gig and even introduced me as the newest team member in a staff meeting… only to have his budget slashed leaving no room to hire on the temp. So I got shut out.
In desperation, I started looking outside the company for a permanent gig that offered benefits and vacation time, and soon I found one. It was part time, and I would have been downloading legal depositions and summarizing them down to a couple pages and sending back out to the lawyers. Heavy editing work that would have put my journalism skills to good use. After I accepted the offer, but before I actually started working there, I was offered another permanent gig, in another state, making $7K more a year, with full medical and dental bennies, plus a buttload of vacation time. Bonus: The hourly rate went up by $0.25 per hour every 90 days, even if all I did was show up and drink coffee all day.
So yeah, I called that legal deposition lab lady and told her thanks but I’m taking this other gig. I have no idea if the legal deposition lab job would have turned into full time or not, but I needed medical coverage, so I did what I had to do. She totally understood and said she was sorry she couldn’t offer me full time with benefits because she thought I’d do an awesome job. I would have. But I’d have had to work retail or wait tables or something just to make the rent.
Let’s start with the 70% pay cut I’d have to take.
And one flight per year home.
And I probably wouldn’t get a day off for a whole year.
There are only a few hundred people in the world who can do my job - and we can get plenty of better work elsewhere.
In 2005 or so applied for a job very similar to the one I still have now in fundraising. Let’s call the place I applied to Midwestern College which Will not be Named (MCWN). MCWN is a relatively small college in respect for the size of its academic clout, and to see the place you’d never guess that they were planning a fundraising campaign of Ivy-league levels. Long and the short of it (and I decided to cut out most of the details to protect the innocent), what came out in the final interview with the VP was that I was going to have one real job there–to help identify donors–and one sub-rosa job, which was to make sure everybody in the department got along.
Which, manifestly, they didn’t. The person who was going to be my supervisor didn’t get along with his boss, the AVP, who in turn didn’t get along with the VP. My would-be supervisor was so out of favor, in fact, that he and his department had been consigned to an office building that looked like an unfinished basement, with sheets of plywood separating the offices. The AVP and VP thought the development officers weren’t doing their jobs, the DOs felt they were understaffed as a unit and were being blamed for poor budget planning. Keep in mind that none of that was explicitly voiced during the interviews, but it was obvious from the get-go (and most of it was confirmed afterwards when I talked to people with knowledge of the office).
I’d already felt that the job I’d applied for was going to be very difficult…I mean, I know how to identify donors but you can only find so many on your own. But I knew after talking to everyone that the unimplied job was going to be impossible. There was no way a guy at level 4 on the totem pole was going to get the people at levels 1, 2, and 3 to get along. There was so much disrespect and outright hostility around the office, the UN couldn’t have brokered a ceasefire. I would have won a Nobel Peace Prize if I’d actually been successful at doing what the VP had asked me to do.
So when I got home I thought about it for another day, then called the office to tell them that I regretted that I had to withdraw. I didn’t tell them why, just said that I had decided to stay on in the position I was in. The secretary, who I’d spoken with during the interviews, seemed very disappointed by that but wished me luck. Over a year passed, and I’d started to forget the whole process.
About 18 months after the interviews, I was at a conference talking to a colleague. She asked me, “What do you know about MWCN? They called me asking me if I wanted to apply for (job I’d applied for).” Apparently after I had turned them down they went into panic mode; they reposted the job several times but didn’t get a candidate who was both qualified and wanted the job after finding out what I found out. Now they were stooping to calling people begging them to apply for the position. The bottom line was, 18 months after I turned them down they still had not filled the position. Now MWCN’s fundraising campaign was starting to take a major turn for the worse because they weren’t identifying donors and everyone still hated each other.
Dodged a major bullet there, I think.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had to look for a job, but a couple of decades ago I went to an interview and found that the job would be about 1/3rd engineering and 2/3rds dealing with government paperwork. The engineering part sounded fun, but dealing with the paperwork part of it was enough to make me not want the job at all. So when they came to the part of the interview where they asked me the salary I was looking for, I gave them a ridiculously high number.
Two days later, they offered me the job, at the ridiculously high salary I had asked for.
I turned them down, but damn, turning down that much money was painful. I just knew it was going to be a soul crushing job though. I ended up taking a job that was much more interesting but a lower salary, and no paperwork hassles to deal with. I still work there, and my soul hasn’t been crushed yet, so I think I made the right choice.
Well, then… good call!
I’ve applied elsewhere a few times since starting my current job. I had to turn down 2 offers because they weren’t “able to” negotiate a higher salary than I’m currently making. I’m not yet sufficiently desperate for new scenery to take a pay cut. I’d rather take the known bullshit I put up with here than the unknown lower-paid bullshit somewhere else (where the bullshit may actually end up being worse). If I could get a 10% bump in my current pay, though, I’d put up with much in the meantime, o my brothers and only friends.
I knew when I walked into the interview that he was going to offer me the job. He virtually said that after ‘hello’. I didn’t have any other offers on the table and money was getting very tight.
There were some phrases that had pinged my BS meter during my internet check on the company and I asked for clarification.
The ‘team’ I’d be joining was him.
The ‘busy office’ was his spare bedroom.
The ‘financially secure’ company had been in operation less than six months (more than half of all businesses fail in their first year, a lot fail in the next etc etc).
The ‘community based industry’ was placing gambling machines into suburban pubs, something I find morally questionable at best and which has since become heavily regulated.
When I questioned him on these issues, the guy became hostile and said that nothing in his ad was ‘technically’ deceitful.
I fretted about having turned it down for a couple of weeks, then applied for and got the job I’m still happily in now. Dodged a bullet since, last time I checked, the other place’s web page had been taken down.
Was offered a job to go work in my great uncles private investigations firm in Wisconsin. Three days later I discovered my g/f was pregnant and was not about to leave.