TL;DR: We sacrifice a lot to get the job we want, but the data says it’s not more than $50k.

Software engineering jobs come with a lot of perks. We have modern offices, our hours are flexible, and recruiters assure us that our projects will change the world. But that doesn’t mean our jobs are perfect. Work requires us to commute, reduces the time we can spend with family, increases our stress levels, and forces us to deal with stressed-out teammates. And sometimes we work for companies with questionable morals and use technologies we don’t enjoy.

For some of us, it’s worth trading cash for a job that fits into our lives better. But figuring out just how much money to give up is difficult without any data.

So we got the data.

We asked the interviewing.io audience about times they accepted a job offer with lower total compensation because they prioritized other aspects of the job. Surprisingly, it turns out that most engineers have never accepted an offer with lower monetary compensation. And for the engineers who have taken lower pay for higher values, we found that $50k was as much as most had sacrificed.

In this post, we’re going to dive into what drives our compensation choices and how that can help you in your next job hunt.

When do we make compensation tradeoffs?

Let’s say you’re on your way to getting a new job. You’ve applied to enough companies, performed well in your interviews, and now you have a stack of exciting offers in your inbox. Of course, you’re negotiating your offers to make sure you’re getting the best deals you can, but your first choice company is still offering you the third most compensation. Should you take the deal?

Or, instead, imagine that you’re working with a team you can’t stand. Before starting to look for a new gig, wouldn’t it be nice to figure out how much it costs to find a better team?

We all value perks differently, but it’s important to know the market value of our values before making major life decisions.

How did you calculate $46,282?

We sent a survey to interviewing.io users that asked about times they’d received multiple offers and had taken the offer with lower compensation. We wanted to know why they selected the lower offer and how much money they left on the table.

For respondents who had never taken a lower-comp offer, we asked what they would sacrifice compensation for. The results below are based on the primary (first ranked) reason respondents said they did (or would) accept a lower offer. We also asked everyone if they had advice for themselves for their next job hunt in a free-form response, which gave us some insight into how people make career decisions.

Let’s dive into the results to see which quality-of-life factors are valued the most.

Pie chart showing responses to a survey asking whether respondents had ever accepted a job offer with lower total compensation, with 70.4% selecting 'No' and 29.6% selecting 'Yes'.

Of the 480 responses, 70% have never taken an offer with lower compensation. It's clear that while money doesn’t solve all of our problems, it certainly must solve a lot of them. There’s no shame in taking the money — the majority of people do.

Some respondents were in the fortunate position where their highest cash offer was also most aligned with other aspects of the job. If you find yourself in this scenario, consider yourself lucky.

The remaining 30% of respondents sacrificed an average of $47k to get something that was important to them.

Bar chart showing average pay cut based on primary reason for accepting lower job offer: Mission $51,300, Commute/Remote $46,282, Work/Life Balance $42,563, Technology $42,250, Prestige $41,214, Team $36,737

The differences in sacrificed pay between different reasons are quite small. The only significant difference was between Team ($37k) and Mission ($51k), which had the smallest and largest average loss in pay.

Mission may have required the largest pay drop because the type of companies that have positive missions tend to have less funding and profit (unfortunately). Their payrolls simply aren’t as big as their “evil” competitors’ payrolls.

Team may have required a significantly lower pay cut because it’s not as concrete of a value as the others, so it’s less worth paying for. Unlike commute time saved by working from home, it’s much harder to quantify an increase in the likelihood you’ll get along with your new teammates. We expect that makes it harder to justify a reduction in compensation.

Bar chart titled 'Pay difference bucketed by amount for all reasons' showing percentage of respondents per pay cut size range: 18% took cuts of $0-$9k and $20k-$24k, 13% took $30k-$34k cuts, 21% took $40k-$44k cuts, 9% took $50k-$54k cuts, 4% took $60k-$64k cuts, 1% each took $70k-$74k, $80k-$84k, $90k-$94k cuts, 6% took $95k-$99k cuts, 8% took over $100k pay cuts.

Around the $50k mark, we see a considerable drop in the number of people who have taken lower pay for their values. There’s a limit to how big of a pay cut we will accept for any reason, and that limit appears to be about $50k.

While the reason for a pay cut appears to not be very significant, the size of the pay cut plays a huge role. We know that money matters when recruiters reach out to us, so it’s not surprising that it also matters when we’re accepting offers.

What about visas?

Surely visa sponsorship doesn’t abide by the $50k cutoff, right? After all, many of the items above could be considered a luxury, but visa sponsorship is not, and in some cases, you may not have many options when making this decision (e.g., if you were laid off and then have 60 days to find a new job before you have to leave the country¹). After computing our initial set of results above, we realized that we had inadvertently left visas out, so we created a second survey about pay sacrifices for visa sponsorships. We asked our audience if they had ever taken a lower paying job to secure a visa, and we asked them to specify what type of visa they received: H-1B, H-1B transfer, non-H-1B, or non-H-1B transfer.

We expected visa sponsorship needs would lead to larger pay cuts than the less tangible requirements in our first survey. Surprisingly, we still found ourselves around the $50k mark.

Bar chart titled 'Average pay cut for visa types and non-visa' showing average difference from maximum offer in thousands of dollars: $51,428 for New Non H-1B visas, $49,051 for Transfer H-1B visas, $46,680 for New H-1B visas, $46,060 for Non-Visa situations.

The averages for new H-1B, new non-H-1B, and transferred H-1B visas were very close to each other and also not significantly different from the average pay cut for intangible, “non-visa” reasons (from the first part of the post). Once again we see a cliff around $50k, beyond which we find few engineers willing to take a pay cut even for immigration status changes.

Bar chart titled 'Pay difference bucketed by amount for visa seekers' showing percentage of respondents per pay cut size range: 3% took $0-$4k cuts, 17% took $10k-$14k and $20k-$24k cuts, 22% took $40k-$44k cuts, 14% took $30k-$34k cuts, 8% took $50k-$54k cuts, 4% took $70k-$74k cuts, 1% took $80k-$84k cuts, 6% each took $90k-$94k and $95k-$99k cuts, 3% took over $100k pay cuts.

The scarcity of accepted offers beyond a $50k pay cut shows us how highly engineers value cash. Both quality-of-life factors and more concrete rewards like visas are equally unlikely to entice them to accept less.

How do our projections compare to our actions?

Finally, we wanted to know if the reasons engineers actually took lower paying jobs reflected the reasons that engineers said they would take lower jobs. For the engineers who had accepted a lower offer, we grouped them by the primary reason they stated for accepting that offer. For engineers who had never accepted a lower offer, we asked them what reasons, if any, they would hypothetically accept a lower offer, and we grouped those engineers by their primary reason.

Two pie charts comparing the primary reasons engineers have accepted or would accept lower paying job offers including work-life balance, commute, prestige, team, mission, and technology

The reasons we actually accept lower-paying jobs appear to line up closely with the reason we think we would accept those jobs. Work/Life Balance is still the clear leader, but Commute/Remote takes up a much larger slice in the hypothetical situation than the real one. That may be a symptom of companies moving back into the office while their engineers want to stay remote. If you just lost your WFH flexibility, consider asking yourself how much you would pay to get it back.

Your next job hunt

So, what can you do with this information? At the beginning of your next job hunt, think critically about your values and consider how much you would pay to keep them. Most engineers in your shoes haven’t sacrificed more than $50k for any reason, so be wary of extending beyond that limit.

If you value working from home but your WFH option pays $10k less, you’re actually getting a great deal compared to your peers. If, on the other hand, you have an offer for a team you’d like to work with more, but it comes with a $80k pay cut, consider that you’re losing roughly twice the average of other engineers looking for the same thing.

If you set yourself up in a strong negotiating position by getting multiple offers, leverage them to make your favorite company compensate you as well as your not-quite-as-great-but-higher-paying choice. If you can’t get them to match, at least try to get them within $50k.

Life isn’t all about money, but it’s up to you to make sure you’re paid what you’re worth.

Author avatar

Elliot Plant

Elliot Plant enjoys everything about building. He has a degree in mechanical engineering, a job writing software, and he tinkers with electronics in his free time. Elliot currently works for Anthropic, and previously spent time at Google and Tesla as well his own startup. When the weather is nice, you can find Elliot walking his dog in the Oakland hills. Online, you can find him on GitHub, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Footnotes

This is terrible, and we wholeheartedly believe these laws need to change. ↩

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