Advice please related to recent job offer

Scotty123

Scotty123

Scotty123

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Joined
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Hi guys (and girls).

I'd appreciate some thoughts into this.

First my background :-

Did a four year integrated masters in maths and physics, then a PhD in computational astrophysics. Been programming since 2008, C, C++, C#, OpenGL, CUDA, high performance stuff and more. Had two academic positions working with big companies and the defence industry since then (for over 30k). Followed by a seven month job for a startup in the US doing web development (Python). Ending salary there was over 50k but I appreciate the US pays more than the UK. This ended a few weeks ago.

Was contacted by a company here for a job, went along. Had a nice chat etc. It's using Python and I have the previous 8 months experience from that in the US startup.

They've offered me a junior position and £21k. They cite I have less than a year's direct experience. I feel like the past six years of my life have been ignored? :p Granted I don't have years and years of direct experience, but I think I've demonstrated proven ability and a good track record. Yes some of it is academic but still.

I'm not going to accept it. The advice of friends is it's insulting and undervaluing myself. I currently do some things from home and that makes me more money than I spend and I am in a very comfortable place financially so no urgency at all to find another job.

Your thoughts? Just after advice I guess. Do you think it's insulting given my experience? Am I underselling my self? Don't want to go into too much detail, no one likes a wall of text :D Thanks
 
I've been and done the research positions. I like the programming too much and that's where my interests lay :D.

I looked around at similar jobs where I live and there are junior positions requiring around year offering high 20s.

As I said I am in no rush at all to find another job. I was on my break in fact for a few months from the last job finishing to pursue a few personal ideas and projects. They contacted me via LinkedIn and I went along. We all got on great, like friends, and everything went perfectly interview/knowledge-wise.
 
I have some jobs going from online, some freelancing and I'm fine with that at the moment. I'm enjoying them and it's building up my skills in some other areas I've wanted to learn. Makes more than my outgoings. I'm in no need at all technically to work so I can wait for what feels right and makes me happy. I was more interested in some other perspectives :).

I wasn't that much of a fan really of the Python web framework I was using during my previous startup so this also made the wage seem even more undesirable. .Net is much more appealing to me too and that would be my main choice if I were to do web development.
 
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Yeah they said 25k after six months.

It did seem like a great place to work honestly and it all seemed good.

The work I do from home at the moment is for a gaming studio startup remotely. The pay is actually less than the 21k currently but it's from home, in my own hours and programming games and graphics is a big passion of mine (my background comes in handy a lot here, lots of maths in gaming which is great for me), more so than web/mobile development. I was weighing it up against that and other things.
 
This would be my third yes, the last was more real world style (the start up and I learnt lots, previous was a postdoc with c++ and gpu programming). I spoke about a lot at the interview and it went perfect when we had it.

I have around 2.5 years work time after my PhD.

I agree they are easily transferable and you are not the first to say. I should add I have the 7/8 months required of the framework and language (Django and Python) for this job, from my last. I consider myself to know a lot of it as I built the whole site in scratch myself almost. I knew nothing when I started but spent many hours pouring over how to do things properly, business design patterns for code and more. Also it was only me there doing on the programming (two others joined but were fired quickly).
 
They are leeds City centre. A thirty minute walk from me. Office with table tennis and a sofa for sleeping :p.

Honestly it all seemed perfect except the salary! Such agony at having to decline it.
 
I'm not a big company kind of person honestly. I have to stay in Leeds too due to my other half. As great as Switzerland would be, Leeds will have to do!
 
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