I start my new job tomorrow. Normally when I leave an employer it’s because they told me to leave, so this has been strange saying quiet goodbyes in person over a few weeks rather than a few minutes with frantic Slack messages before my computer eerily shuts down via remote IT.
I wore Jimmy Choo cologne my last couple of office days in anticipation of goodbye hugs. The nozzle is heavy to push and control; thus too much was applied each time. I’m afraid people will think of me as even weirder than they would have before, sans the scent of overindulged luxury. Was I a software administrator, or a visiting new-money tycoon from the rice paddies of China who just bought his first bottle of cologne? No one can remember definitively.
It was tough to go. In an unfair irony, with my ever-more-pragmatic career philosophy influenced by being fired several times, I proactively fired a company that probably would have been the last of the bunch to fire me. They have private equity make-it-thunderstorm cash, a sticky retention rate for their software and often effectively no competitors for their hardware, grant money essentially earmarked for them, and a charming family culture led by the founder’s son as CEO.
A recruiter from a small tech company reached out via LinkedIn. I get a stream of those from staffing companies, but when it’s an in-house recruiter the invitation feels more real. I turned down a handful of intriguing ones over the years and later got rewarded for my loyalty with the ax, although to be fair it was more inertia than loyalty.
Happy in the present but jaded from the past, I finally did the logical thing which is just take the call. Thirty minutes has no measurable cost. Then there was enough interest during that chat to make the full interview process worth the time.
But the top of their listed salary range was only a bit more than what I was making at a place where I was fulfilled, so my stipulation was to not exceed a light amount of effort interviewing. Prep for each round amounted to just a few minutes of googling and mental reps of basic questions. I didn’t prepare for the hour-long technical assessment and would have withdrawn had there been a take-home assignment.
They moved fast and made it easy. I never even had to update my résumé. The offer came in at their top number. Not that I am anywhere near manager or Anthropic pay bands, but leaving for $8K didn’t feel right. Neither did walking away from a sensible opportunity in terms of go-to-market software stack and being able to define road map as their first in-house hire.
Ultimately I landed on countering with a big number. I think that’s a good rule in life, though hard to execute against our wired insecurities. Don’t say no on behalf of other people. Ask for what you want and make them say it. I would have gotten laid exponentially more in my younger days, or at least a few more times.
The tricky thing about giving a number is being bold without offensive and knowing if they agree to it, you have to go. It’s not nice to jerk busy people around with something too low or high. I settled on a round number, which underlines how arbitrary of an exercise it is, about $23K higher in base and $10K in bonus potentially.
I didn’t have a number going into it and kind of retrofitted a justification. For me the money could be put to good use:
Snazzy marketing tends to pierce my armor of rationality, and I’ve been paying large premiums for grassfed and wild-caught products without any understanding of the benefits.
My 2007 Honda Pilot only recently exceeded 100,000 miles, but Father Time and inflation cannot be denied. A few years at a $25K bump would cover hybrid minivan payments or even an outright purchase.
Our kids should feel lucky to have their grandparents on both sides, and we want to take trips to Asia with them during this ephemeral window of decent health. One of the joys of marrying and reproducing is every time you want to fly somewhere cool, look at the ticket price and multiply by four. Even from Dallas to L.A. for Thanksgiving, between two major airports with flight time shorter than a Christopher Nolan movie, is like two grand.
Until Costco adds college tuition to its famous inventory that spans cradle to casket, we might have to drop a million dollars including loan interest to get two kids through college in the late 2030s. I keep waiting for a market dip to make a hefty deposit in their 529s. The strategy is not working. I saw a guy in a Wharton shirt and asked him if he times the market. He said no, the market times me. I understand this conceptually but cannot resist temptation.
So basically I sold out. Technical aspects of the new gig appealed, but the raise made it work. Here’s me signing the offer letter shirtless because you always want to start any business endeavor with a power move. My pen pal told me last month enough with the abs pics, we get the point. The point is the process, my friend, and the only thing I apologize for is not framing this one lower.
There is a wide spectrum of what it means to sell out. That monster who screwed over the Starks in the Red Wedding resides in the precise center of hell. But in a free marketplace, capitalist economy, I feel like everyone should have the right to find their value or better yet, hire Deshaun Watson’s agent to do it for you. Netflix’s legendary culture deck encourages employees to interview elsewhere and see if their manager wants to keep them.
In a different application but the same broad category of making a personal choice to take a risk and get paid, I don’t think Sydney Sweeney has anything to apologize for either. Normally I fly above the intellectual peasantry of those subsisting on social media algorithms, but this was in the upper right of The New York Times. Faceless critics and some public figures are blasting her over an aggressively nude social media ad for a sports gambling platform.
I am missing something here. The uproar seems to be around setting back female athletes. Sydney Sweeney is an actress, not an athlete. This is not Caitlin Clark promoting the WNBA in lingerie. I don’t see how any serious or aspiring female athlete will catch a 50-second clip of a 5-foot-3 rom com star covering her goalposts with footballs and be affected. Title IX should be able to survive this too.
Even the advertiser isn’t sports. Injecting more opinion than logic here, if you’re the type to fill voids in life with superficial moral outrage, gambling should draw the stronger objection (especially since actual female athletes have posed nude). It probably has a net-negative effect on society, from addiction destroying lives, to death threats when player performance loses bets, to scandals and compromised love of the game, to Shohei never trusting English translations again.
But Sweeney or anyone should still have the right to make the ad. If Ryan Gosling did a version, I would watch it with roughly equal interest. There would be less strokes per minute under the keyboard, more cross-country skiing than Shake Weight, but still a healthy rate. I’m kidding, nothing to see here, only strokes on the keyboard.
Maybe it’s just my gag-humor relationship with nudity, but I didn’t even find the content that sexual. It was kind of funny in an over-the-top way, like a Saturday Night Live skit. The haters should be specific here: Are you saying no one can make that ad, or just her? If a heavyset transgender actor proud of their physique wanted to put one out on social media, I vote absolutely yes. Stifling either is a vast overreach.
It should be more than a footnote there is something just as sexy to me as the whitey tighties. It was Sweeney who approached the company. She became an equity partner and something like a de facto creative director on the campaign, which no doubt got the attention of its male target audience and then broadened with cultural discussion. The mortally offended should know I, for one, would never have seen the ad if you weren’t so mad about it. I’m no Kellogg grad but that was brilliant marketing at least partially engineered by a killer whose livelihood depends on publicity, the kind of shirtless power move I can get behind.