Ask HN: Why did you accept a lower salary?

I'm in almost the exact same situation as you, except I'll add one thing. I worked a string of really heinous jobs where the work environment was extremely toxic. Bosses yelling in your face, watching you work over your shoulder while drinking their morning coffee, other employees being verbally and physically aggressive. I don't particularly like the company I'm at, but I get to work remotely, it's super relaxed, and I can pretty much put the hours in whenever I want. If I leave to go somewhere else, I have no idea what kind of situation I'd be getting myself into.

I get paid a bit below 100k, which in Los Angeles with 5+ years experience is pretty bad, but my end goal is to build my own business.

Don't forget that if you want to start your own company, the more money you have saved up the better. Then you have a longer runway before you have to start talking to investors, etc. Having a higher salary now will help you do that.

1. I could work from home most days of the week. 2. I enjoyed the work. 3. The expectation was a maximum of 40 hours/week, which I thought I wanted at the time. When I worked more, my manager explicitly told me to work less.

I accepted a lower salary because I went from maintaining a shitty VB6 apps to a company that uses .NET, hoping I could learn something more marketable working there.

It wasn't worth it, they had a bunch of incredibly stupid systems and maintaining these was even worse than the VB6 apps. On top of that they lied to me - I was supposed to work on a new project and instead I worked on sorting out the mess that other programmers made. I noticed that some other people on the team did more or less the same kind of a job, expect their pay was better since they didn't have "junior" in the title.

I will never accept a pay cut again.

Scope of challenge and room to learn, coupled with sufficient support to enable meaningful impact on a world-class problem.

With the right mix of global problem plus virtually unlimited resources, and depending on your personal values and the company culture, a big co with built-in funding and mass market can be more rewarding than “home run” startup money.

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My second job was a Linux consultant, Python / Java Developer. At that time the salaries was rather poor as everything with money involved Windows and .Net. But I found Unix technologies a lot more interesting, especially for learning and solving the really hard problems.

I really enjoyed that job, the problems we solved were challenging and fun. And I learned so much, I accepted that lower salary as I bet on Linux, Python and Java knowledge would be in demand later. And today I'm really happy that I specialized in these technologies, because the market has really changed in my favor the last three years.

In my case, this was only for an internship. I study in Canada where the interns in CS and Computer engineering are rather well paid (easily over 20USD per hour for a first internship). I accepted a much lower salary to work in start-up in Copenhagen (its called pleo.io). The experience was amazing and the team was awesome, but it is hard to live in such an expansive city with an intern salary of around 1600USD per month. Only renting a room in a shared apartment usually costs more than 800-900USD per month.

I cut my salary in half going back to research after some years in a HFT gig. I'm gaining quality of work (wider breadth of topics), quality of people (world class researchers) and quality of life (office 10 min from home instead of 90, travel to conferences, ...).

I recently accepted a 10K/year lower salary ($70K instead of $80K).

Better work/life balance inc. flexible hours, generous paid vacation/sick, closed for Christmas & federal holidays (on top of paid vacation), and unlimited (but optional) telecommuting.

The $80K would have cut my flexible vacation by a third, no closure at Christmas, flexible hours gone, and telecommuting pretty much gone (with a "maybe" they'll start in the future). Plus the commute was fifteen minutes more each way.

I may have made the wrong decision financially, but I have a family, and I get to see them a lot more telecommuting, we get to go on family holidays, we get to spend time together at Christmas, and flexible hours will help picking them up/dropping off at school.

Because it was a life goal to move from the US to Europe for a while and because my wife is much less fearful.

Not an engineer, just a marketer/writer. Had two jobs offered, one offered 15k more a year. Took the other job: it fell in line with my strengths, I can be full time remote from my forest, and I knew my new boss at lower paying gig, while expecting me to still work hard, would be good about making sure I got off on time to go to gym as well as respecting when I needed to take vacation. Do I sort of wish I had more money? Yes. But I'm in this company for the long haul, and I decided 15k was worth the specific lifestyle I wanted over the long haul.

I relocated from the NE back to Austin and took a lower pay. I grew up in the South and didn't like how impolite people are in the NE. I actually didn't fit w the regional culture. Goes to show how important culture fit is for work too.

In my case because it was - own office in a building 15 minute walk from where I live as the only developer working on an interesting problem Vs a 7 mile commute by public transport to work on a less interesting problem in an open office with 30 other Devs.

It just wasn't even a choice for me, the final kicker is employer operates a strict 9-5 policy for work, not had that expectation on a Dev job in a long time.

My last job was a political hellhole where they imported new management and new management imported their friends and marginalized the people who built the company pre-aquisition.

I had 6 offers 2 years ago. I chose the third highest salary option because of the unique company culture and people. Totally correct decision in hindsight.

I accepted a lower salary (135k vs 150k) and a lower title (lead for a project rather than lead for the department on every project) because of work culture.

I can fix code etc, but it's very hard to change culture. It would have been a big step up in many regards but culture is a huge part of accepting a job.

To move from union to mgmt. Yes, I was a ditch digger 16 yrs ago. Now i'm a PM in Tech Svcs. The 10k/yr paycut hurt, especially in Seattle right now, but work remote on somewhat interesting projects, no commute, get so spend time in the presence of family.

I accepted a lower salary (than another offer, but more than what I make right now) at a company whose product I'm excited about, they had a team of more experienced people than my current company and I moved from frontend to a fullstack position. Of course, only time would tell if this was a good decision.

I really wanted to be part of the team I'm currently in. I thought I would learn a lot with them and become a much better developer, turned out to be true.

I asked for less money just to make sure I would still be hired.

My employer has good policies on ADA accommodations. I still need to go into the office, but I feel good that when I can't anymore I'll still have a job with them.

Plus, I went from being responsible for the PM side of data architecture to natural language processing. Way less stress, way better skill set.

Work life balance, lower expectations at work and no internal competition. As bad as it sounds like, that's what I need since I burnt out not a while ago. The pay cut was mostly made on stocks/bonus. I lost a lot of those by leaving my previous employer. My base is actually slightly bigger now. In other words, it feels like I'm really getting paid for what I do everyday and that the salary/productivity expectation is at a sweet spot on both sides.

Last time I was interviewing for jobs I took the lowest of my 3 offers. There were several reasons for this, I will refer to the accepted offer as A and other offers as B and C.

1) Large corporation vs small corporation, offers B and C were for very large corporations (one private and one public) and I took job A because I do not enjoy bureaucracy.

2) Challenge. Offer B was a job I felt I could already do 100% and everything I really wanted to do was offered as a "maybe if things go the right way you'll get to build something cool." Offer C seemed challenging, but was a different direction for my career. Offer A offered as much challenge as I was willing to accept and was very aligned with my career goals.

3) Flexibility. Offer B - no work from home until after a year, but even then it's not guaranteed and at most once a week. Offer C - it seemed like people were only allowed to work from home when there was a state of emergency/snow-closures, etc. Offer A - we are as flexible as possible, we are more concerned with getting the work done.

Also worth noting, I was the youngest person on staff when I was hired at company A. At B and C there were tons of people my age - I think this is why they had a worse work/life balance. I'm single and no kids, but most people I work with are pretty established in that regard. I believe I benefit a lot from the fact that my older coworkers won't accept crappy work/life balance.

4) Connecting with people. I definitely connected with those at company A moreso than those at company B and C. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that at companies B and C people were just going through the motions during the hiring process, so it felt very robotic.

Also, while interviewing at company A it was very acceptable to discuss the displeasures of working at public corporations (I was able to have a very blunt convo with a CxO during my interview - and we commiserated a bit on our non-optimal experiences working at them).

I took a 30k paycut for my current job.

Why? because they gave me the ultimate perk, 100% remote!

I'm heading to thailand next week and plan to just travel around the world. As a bonus, my total living cost in southeast asia (including rent food and plane tickets) is going to be less than what I pay in rent right now.

I took a 40k paycut moving to New Zealand back in 2001. I don't regret it, since leaving my country of birth, things have only gone backwards there, and NZ is a great place to raise my son.

Since I was here, I took a 10k paycut once, to move from a big company to a small startup.

It was the right call, but I was lucky, and it was by no means guaranteed to work out (2009 was scary).

Company got acquired by a massive one, and compensation ramped back up to the top of the scale (w/ RSUs making total comp p.a. something I can't match elsewhere in the local market - I interviewed around, and found out I was making substantially more than the CEO of the startup I interviewed at).

But thinking of making the move again, since I'm feeling my skills atrophy a bit, and financially now on a solid footing, so I'd like to work somewhere a little more fast-paced.

The last time I jumped ship I did not took a paycut - actually a got a small raise - but took a job where I am paid ca. 15% less than my market value. I was recruited by the VP of IT at a small company. We used to work together in the past and he knows what I am capable of if I work under the right conditions, which excludes discussions about BS and interruptions through "burning issues". I do what I love to do, I set my own priorities and my own deadlines. I have a site in Confluence showing the satus of my current projects, he gets every two weeks an e-mail from me with the actual highlights/achievements and once a month we go for lunch together where I can ask him for guidance. I can take some time learning new technologies during working hours and make homeoffice now and then. Why should I leave? Actually I can imagine working for someone else than me only under these conditions.