1

Hey people, I could use your help on deciding which of 2 job offers to take.

Offer 1:
- same city as me right now
- around 30 minutes commute total per day
- average salary (for my experience)
- tasks: infrastructure, windows, Linux
- 30 days vacation
- financial sector

Offer 2:
- one city over
- around 2 hour commute per day (but home office is possible after the introduction period)
- pays 600 euros more than offer 1 (greatly above average entry salary, for me)
- tasks: infrastructure, mostly linux
- 27 days vacation
- e-learning industry

Both jobs are in the German state of Saxony.
This will be my first full-time job, since I finished my apprenticeship last year.

Comments
  • 3
    Offer 2, clearly. The biggest disvantage is the distance and can be neutralized with home office some times a week. Much more money, less Windows why do you hesitate.
  • 5
    Maybe 2 with temporary flat? Sure, that 600 extra pay will be used for flat expenses, but only during introduction period.

    Or maybe ask 1st company for higher pay or check/negotiate for promotion options.
  • 1
    I have worked with several different financial companies before and I prefer to never work with that sector again. Numerous reasons.

    If I had to choose between the two, I would go with the second one. Sounds like more fun and pays more. Look at that extra as gas expense until you hit the mark where you can do it remote.
  • 1
    Without any doubts the second.
    To hell with Windows.
    Plus money conpensates expenses
  • 0
    Entry job. No question. Take the money. Setting the baseline for the rest of your life. Very important. But of course it have to feel OK. Congrats!!!
  • 2
    Sometimes I'll calculate how many hours I gotta spend to go to work and divide my salary by that.

    If you work 8 hour days and commute 2 hours you're spending 10 hours of your day to work.

    If you earn $600 per day that'll just be $60 per hour away from home.

    Compare that to a job with 0.5h commute earning you $550 per day. That's $64 per hour away from home.

    Unless you really value that podcast-listening commute time.
  • 0
    How long do you plan to work there?

    At my first job I had a fairly long commute and I kinda liked it and spent my train time being super productive. For a few months I did a lot of reading, video classes, programming etc on the train. Then the internet started failing halfway through the train ride and I gave up. And I got tired. Ended up just semi-sleeping and listening to podcasts and thinking "why the hell am I spending unpaid hours of my life on this train when I could work 15 minutes away from my house?"
  • 3
    Regarding choice of sector: I kinda feel like the vibe of the team and the daily tasks is more important when it comes to feeling engaged in your job - than the sector.

    I used to imagine I wanted to work for bleeding edge startups with public facing sites, but to my surprise I enjoyed working on some internal government projects. As long as I got interesting tasks. (Which, granted, is kind of impossible to guess based on a job interview)
  • 0
    @jiraTicket I completely agree that people you work with are the main reason how you feel about the job in general.

    You can learn technical things but you can't change an asshole into decent person!

    My experience so far is that financial sector attracts mostly that one special kind of people, the kind I can't work with and can't put up with their shit.

    Real life analogy would be that different car brands attracts similar kind of people (looking at you BMW).
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