Job offer situation is stressing me out. How do I handle this?

February 9, 2013 12:36 PM

Job offer situation is stressing me out. How do I handle this?

I'm currently employed full-time as a web developer... I'm working in a small town in northern alberta. I'm getting paid $4000 a month. Pretty good for only a one-year college degree and 4-5 years experiance. Anyway, I work 6 days a week 6 AM - 8 PM and I always have to be in the office. I can't negotiate my hours or work elsewhere. The other employee's are decent to work with, but my boss really overloads me and is kind of intimidating to be around most of the time. The thing is, I pretty much hate this town. I haven't made any friends I really click with since I moved here a year ago, dating-wise its been terrible and I just feel like I have no life because I work so much. I work, workout and sleep and that has been my routine 6 days a week. Not to mention I am not a big fan of winter at all :(.

I would have quit by now, but my mother who is sick is counting on me to support her financially right now.

My old work (in a more desireable city) randomly offered me a full-time position working for them. It's about the same amount of money, I can work from home / anywhere I want 40% of the time, I really like the people I would be working with and it would be a 9-6 position so I could maybe start making time for a life again! Well, they made me that offer 3 weeks ago. I drove down to that city to sit down and have a meeting with them about it. They are a small company and said to me this would be a big decision to bring me on and they needed to run it past their accountant first and asked me to send them my payslips from my current work. I did that two weeks ago. Since then I have heard almost nothing from them.

I don't want to pressure them or anything so I haven't been in touch but now I'm starting to get nervous. I really, really want this job and feel like I have to be careful to make this all fall into place.

How should I proceed?

posted by audio to Work & Money (4 answers total)

Three things off the top of my head, in order:

1. Make sure there's no irregularity in your pay slips. Sometimes accountants make mistakes. And sometimes exploitative employers do things that aren't mistakes.

2. If you were given a tracking number when you mailed out the pay slips, use that to check whether they've been delivered. (If you didn't get a tracking number, you might want to consider that next time you mail something important. Sometimes the post office makes mistakes.)

3. Contact your old work again to ask whether they've gotten your pay slips. Use this opportunity to mention again your interest in the job. Focus on how you know and like the people, because bringing up the work/life balance stuff might make you seem desperate, which is bad to signal even (especially!) if it's true.

Also, it's worth noting, just to take the pressure off, that you are currently making $12/hour. As a web developer who has five years' experience and is willing to relocate, you should not have trouble finding a second company willing to offer better than $12/hour. So don't stress out so much about this one offer.
posted by d. z. wang at 1:07 PM on February 9, 2013

Why wouldn't you simply call them to confirm that they've received your paycheck stubs, which, by they way, is a weird request, and ask them what the next steps are and if they're moving forward with an offer of employment?
posted by shoesietart at 2:00 PM on February 9, 2013

Yeah the pay slips thing is really weird, IMHO. Maybe it's different in Canada than the US. Why does it matter to them what you were being paid previously?

It's totally appropriate if you haven't heard anything for two weeks to call them up to follow up, find out if they got the pay slips, etc.

And if this offer for whatever reason doesn't work out, don't give up, keep looking for opportunities elsewhere. It really sounds like you are working ridiculous hours for slave wages, degree or not.
posted by radioamy at 2:06 PM on February 9, 2013 [3 favorites]

There's much that is practically wrong with your current situation as well as the one you're being offered, but the most important thing I can say to you is that I smell lack of confidence here. You need to shore up your own self-image and stop settling for hours you don't want, for too little pay, in a city you don't like. Once you understand your own worth you will move on from situations that are clearly beneath you without all the hand-wringing and analyzing employers' actions. Both of these employers are shitty. It's shitty to pay a web developer with 4-5 years' experience $13 an hour--they are either worth far more or they aren't worth hiring at all. It's shitty for an employer to feel entitled to your pay slips (jesus, it's bad enough when they feel entitled to know your salary history!). Don't even bother hand-wringing about them, they are not worth it and there are absolutely better situations out there for you.

I was making more than $70k after 4 years of web dev experience, and that was almost a decade ago. This was AFTER the dot com bust. And I was not some phenomenal coder, but self-taught and with many other interests, not a single-minded focus on developing. With a college degree, but not a relevant one. And not working the insane hours you are. And I was earning significantly less than some web devs I knew. Your salary sucks donkey balls, dude. It is in no way shape or form "pretty good".

You should do it for yourself, but if you're not there yet, then do it for ma. Right now you are most emphatically not earning what you could be earning to help support her.
posted by parrot_person at 12:55 AM on February 10, 2013 [1 favorite]