An Embarassment of Riches

March 20, 2015 2:18 PM

Should I Decline a Job I Already Accepted?

This is sorta borrowing trouble, but maybe not. Three weeks ago I accepted a job offer in IT. It is a Very Good Job (job 1). Starts on Monday.

This week I was notified that I am a final candidate for a Fucking Good Job With Lots More Compensation (job 2). This job would start about a month from now.

Is it unethical to start job1, knowing that if I get offered job2, I will bolt after only one month? I'd especially like to hear from IT hiring guys/senior engineers. Thx!

posted by j_curiouser to Work & Money (25 answers total)

I'm probably going to go against the crowd when I say, take job 1, and if job 2 comes about, burn your bridges and jump ship. Unless your contract makes that punitive, feel free to treat the job market as the market that it is and take as much advantage as you can of your enviable position in it. If you're not breaking a contract, the ethical implications are negligible, and coextensive with the ethical implications of capitalism in general. Ceteris paribus and all.
posted by dis_integration at 2:22 PM on March 20, 2015 [26 favorites]

You have no guarantees you'll be offered job offer #2. And to be honest, the best thing you can do for your fellow employees in job #1 is to be creating vacancies in positions. Repeated vacancies force the employer to increase wages better than any other method. Management doesn't share all company information to their employees. You're not obligated to share your outside information to management.
posted by DetriusXii at 2:28 PM on March 20, 2015 [15 favorites]

IT guy here. Absolutely do not take the first job if you are confident that you will get the second one. The first month at any job, particularly in IT, is very heavy on training and knowledge transfer - so you'll spend a month getting up to speed, which among other things costs existing employees of job1 not-insignificant chunks of their time, just to leave a month later when job2 comes calling? That's really not cool, particularly if you could ever see a scenario where you might end up needing a job with job1's company ever again (never underestimate how small the IT community is in any given town). Hiring managers have long memories.

Honestly, if you can afford to wait the month and are sure the Fucking Good Job has a great chance of being yours, wait for it. Don't waste job1's time. If you take job1, plan on sticking it out for at least a year.
posted by pdb at 2:29 PM on March 20, 2015 [6 favorites]

Take Job 1. Jump to job 2.

I've always regretted not taking then ditching Job 1, having been through this scenario twice in my life.
posted by slateyness at 2:34 PM on March 20, 2015 [13 favorites]

I say take job 1. Leave if you get job 2. To address an earlier comment, you do not owe a company a year of your life just because you agreed to an (at-will!) employment offer.

I think that you just started is kind of irrelevant; if they want to prevent employees from leaving in a hot market, they can try to make their job the best and people will be less likely to leave. Otherwise, that's a risk they run, and honestly it would be a bigger hassle for them if a senior employee left rather than the new guy.
posted by substars at 2:36 PM on March 20, 2015 [16 favorites]

Take Job 1, then be willing to leave for Job 2. They would NOT hesitate to fire you after 1 month if they thought you weren't doing well/were a bad hire.
posted by amaire at 3:00 PM on March 20, 2015 [15 favorites]

I think pdb has got it as to why this is rather unethical and could bite you later. But what you can ethically do right now is tell Job 2 people that you have Job 1 offer and that you will accept Job 2 right now if they offer it to you. I'll tell you from experience that not only is this truthful, it is also a killer closer move on a job/opportunity you want that hasn't quite been extended to you yet.
posted by bearwife at 3:06 PM on March 20, 2015 [15 favorites]

Take job 1 and if you get another offer later, well, that's a pretty good problem to have.

I have seen enough bad behavior on the part of employers that I don't really buy the ethics argument others have presented. My position is that the reality is you are the only person who is looking out for you and they are the only people looking out for them. If you get a better offer, it's polite to give them an opportunity to counter offer, but it's not like they would worry about ethics if they have an awful quarter and have to lay you off months after hiring you. I think the ethical thing is to tell them (in broad strokes) about your incredible new opportunity and give them an opportunity to counter offer. If they are spiteful and vindictive enough to flip out over this, you know what kind of job it'd turn into.
posted by feloniousmonk at 3:32 PM on March 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

I agree that if you knew for sure you had job #2 locked down, it would be unethical to start at job #1 with the intention of working there for just one month. But you don't know for sure about job #2, so you need to look out for yourself by playing it safe and starting at job #1. Keep in mind that you likely will be burning a bridge with company #1 and possibly other companies if it's a small world as others mentioned above.

Also seconding bearwife's suggestion:
tell Job 2 people that you have Job 1 offer and that you will accept Job 2 right now if they offer it to you.
posted by sunflower16 at 3:39 PM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Take job 1. Leave if you get job 2.

You don't owe your employers anything except what is set out in your contract. If you are offered job 2, give the required notice and go on your merry way.

It will be inconvenient for job 1, but it's a reality of recruitment. They'll either be professional and recognise that you are making the right decision for you, or they'll be dicks about in, in which case you will have made the right decision by leaving.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:42 PM on March 20, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm in tech and have been through this. I took Job 1 and worked there for about a week before Job 2 called to offer me Dream Position. I quit Job 1 and never looked back. Stayed at Job 2 for seven years. No regrets.

Companies are not people. Yes, people work there and you will piss off Job 1 if you leave so soon after accepting their offer, but it's one day of some uncomfortable interactions when you announce you're leaving. If Job 2 really is all that, you won't be making a mistake by leaving Job 1 should it come to that.
posted by hollisimo at 3:47 PM on March 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

If you quit before you start, you burn bridges with company 1 and the hiring manager and a couple HR people. If you quit after a month, you burn bridges with all of them plus you're "that weirdo who quit after a month" to everyone on the team. If you're like hollisimo and you then work at job #2 for seven years, sure, the burned bridges will be old news by the time you're looking for a new job. But are you sure that's going to be the situation? Are you sure you're not going to go to job #2 and then it turns out it sucks, or the division closes, and you're back in the job market in six months?

One of the areas where metafilter tends to give really bad advice is around job ethics (presumably because it's tied up with the general fuck-corporations upper-class white liberal ethos). But the thing is, you can solve this purely as a social problem without having to get into ethics at all - if friend 1 invited you to a great party, and you said sure, and then later friend 2 invited you to an even better party at the same time, would you switch? Presumably the answer is maybe yes and maybe no, depending on how good friends you are with each, how much you care about being friends, who else is going to the parties, who else the friends will complain about you to in the future, etc. Deal with it like that and leave ethics out.

And note that this is exactly the same philosophy as "you are the only person looking out for you", "treat the job market as a market", etc - I'm just saying if you want to act like a rational economic actor, you should look beyond what's good for you tomorrow and think about what'll be good for you in a year or in five years.
posted by inkyz at 4:22 PM on March 20, 2015 [5 favorites]

Take job 1. You have no idea what things will be like in a month. Job 2 may come through. Or not. You may discover that you freaking *LOVE* job 1. You might find the love of your life working at job 1, and winning their heart may take more than a month. Etc.
posted by doctor tough love at 4:33 PM on March 20, 2015

I think a way to do this is to first tell Job 1 that you need to delay your start date (it being on Monday causes some problems but hopefully you can still get in touch with someone). This, of course, will raise their alarm bells, but it shouldn't necessarily have them fire you on the spot. Then you tell Job 2 that you need an answer within the next week (or before Job 1 starts).

This assumes that you are stable enough to take a week or two off work.

Also, this is what you should have done pre-acceptance. Why did you accept an offer starting this soon when other potentially better offers were on the table?
posted by thewumpusisdead at 4:39 PM on March 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've been in this position. I took the first job and then left after 2 months. It was awkward but I have no regrets. (And it didn't hurt me in the long run - I've been at the second job for more than five years.) There are no guarantees in life - and as a previous response noted, Job1 wouldn't hesitate to fire you if you weren't working out.
posted by barnoley at 5:11 PM on March 20, 2015

Response by poster: Why did you accept an offer starting this soon when other potentially better offers were on the table?

job2 seemed like a long-shot and I hadn't been able to get any feedback from job2 HR until wed this week. it's really not a question of comparing offers, as only one has been on the table so far.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:34 PM on March 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

It makes me want to weep when I read these kinds of employment "is it ethical" questions. I want to be able to imprint on the very SOUL of anyone asking these sorts of questions that in almost 100% of cases, employers DO NOT CARE whether what they do is ethical. They will do whatever they may legally do to you that benefits them, period. PERIOD. Don't extend all this consideration about ethics to an entity that is inherently out for itself and has no interest in treating you ethically. Save your ethics for human beings, not corporations. And even then, workplace human beings are to be treated with skepticism and reserve. Don't slather on the ethics unless you know a coworker or supervisor also cares about being ethical to you.

You should do whatever benefits you, within the law, period. In this case, I believe that is taking job 1 and then leaving it for job 2, unless you have a specific reason to think that would harm you. I don't see that it would. Perhaps someone at job 1 might not be happy if you leave, but people quit jobs all the time--and people are let go from jobs all the time--including only a month after hire.
posted by mysterious_stranger at 5:54 PM on March 20, 2015 [14 favorites]

I don't think this is terribly unethical, and most people will understand leaving a good job for a way better job for much more money, even in the short term. You will almost certainly burn job 1 with the higher ups, but your ex-coworkers will generally understand. (Plus, you know, you haven't actually gotten job 2 yet. And maybe after a month at job 1 you will love it and not want to leave.)


That said, you typically get to do this once before it will burn bridges everywhere, so make sure this is the time to do it.
posted by jeather at 6:20 PM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

I had to check your profile to make sure you're not my new hire who starts Monday. I spent four months holding that position open to find a great candidate and finally found one and I would be beyond annoyed if I spent four months looking for a new hire, then another month of my time and my team's time training them, only to have the new hire quit after a few weeks. As a tech manager, I'd rather you just declined first thing Monday morning and let me get back to my search. No harm, no foul, no skin off my budget or reputation as a manager.

That said, it's not unethical to do what you're considering doing. It is, however, shitty. Tech is an incestuous industry. Beware the bridges you're burning.
posted by erst at 6:28 PM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would say it also depends on the seniority level of the job.

Entry-level/junior positions are much easier to fill and will get far less blowback than senior ones.
posted by Tamanna at 8:23 PM on March 20, 2015

You owe job 1 exactly what they give you - are they having you sign a contract? If not and you're at will? Well, that works both ways.
posted by zug at 8:32 PM on March 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

Act in your own best interest, i.e., take job 1, jump to a better job whenever it comes along. You can be sure the company will act in it's own best interest when it deals with you.
posted by she's not there at 11:58 PM on March 20, 2015

You work for a month then leave. A month a after that no one will even remember you, your will be first in the wind, tears in the rain. If you're offered job 2 don't hesitate for a second. You should get a permanent market and wire'later, melonfarmers' on the back of your hand to remind you when the time comes.
posted by biffa at 12:05 AM on March 21, 2015

My opinion of this situation is colored by the fact the the second job is apparently significantly better than the first job. I had a colleague who was in this situation-- he moved laterally after a month to a slightly different company with roughly the same responsibilities. Although I'm sure he had his reasons, it was a bit annoying. However if the second job is vastly superior to the first job, I think people might be inclined to be more understanding.
posted by acidic at 1:01 AM on March 21, 2015

I think it really depends on your location and industry. Leaving a job after a month screws them over pretty good; basically you're leaving before they even get any work out of you. And they'll have to restart their whole search process, which is expensive.

Basically, in a smaller, closer-knit industry leaving after a month could screw you over further down the line.
posted by mskyle at 5:34 AM on March 21, 2015