Ask HN: Would you choose good pay or more interesting job?
The first is full remote, flexible, $120k+ a year total comp, and involves being the main and only DS guy for a small startup. Great pay (4x my current totalcomp) and perks. The ML I am going to do is kind of boring. This role will probably give me good business experience.
The second one is an office job with relocation to Portugal, making ML/CV for cutting edge industrial robotics, working under a very strong professor. But only $45k total comp. Maybe they can give me $80k a year tops (still negotiating).
Most of you will probably want to jump in and yell: "Over 2 times more money? That's a no-brainer!" The problem is that I basically never cared so much about a job as I care about this second offer. It's literally the first time in my life when I heard about a mission and didn't consider it BS. Usually, I nod along to missions and visions, treating them as kind of a pretense game we play, where companies try to imitate early Google or something, and we pretend we are not seeing it. But this time it really hit me: a job where I am needed, the product is important, the business is selling something real, the people seem so cool we spent most of the interviews joking.
I have never had such a hard choice between jobs in my life. Usually I choose based on long term returns. But here long term returns are good for both options, but in different aspects. For my financials the first one is way better, for my skills the second one is way better.
What would you choose? Have you had experience choosing money over opportunity or vise versa, and regretting it?