Thanks for your insight. I'm at a similar crossroads currently and leaning toward staying in my current role. Basically about 14 years ago, I left a Fortune 500 company where I was a Network Administrator for a decade to go to a University and took a large pay cut to become an IT Analyst. Primary reason was wanting to get another degree, cheaply. After 7 years as an Analyst, I was promoted to manager of the team. After 3 years of that, I realized I wasn't good at managing people and I was a "do-er," and left from managing (with a HUGE paycut, again) to go back to Analyst in county government.

Fast forward 3 years and here I am, being asked to be an Interim-Director as the director here is now retiring and I'm the only one with management experience. They are then in turn 'encouraging' me to apply for the full time director position, saying how I'm the most qualified and despite the "promote from within" policy, they want me to go up against external candidates to "earn" the job they asked me to interim.

I've wracked my brain for a week now--I'm an engineer level do-er, I'm not a manager, but 22K a year is a NICE increase and I want to buy a home. Part of me says "thanks but no thanks, I'm not going to apply for a promotion to a job you obviously think I'm qualified for but won't offer out-right if its going to be a massive paradigm shift AGAIN for me," and another part says, "Dude, you're so dumb if you don't apply for a job that pays 30% more than you're currently making!"

I've got a couple weeks to decide--money isn't my driving factor, the ability to "turn off" at the end of the day is.