Turning Down Offers is Fun

I guess this post could be considered a follow up to my Job Hunt in the Valley. I secured an oral offer from Cosmix today. They sure tried really hard to beat me down. First, they had the senior recruiter from their headhunter call me. He was trying to convince me that salary offer Cosmix was about to make was their best. He went so far as to bet me a lunch that I wouldn't get a penny more. I told him to clear his lunch calendar.

Then, this evening, I got a call from Cosmix co-founder, Venky Harinarayan. He is a nice enough guy and I thought we were getting along quite well. The conversation was frank and I got the chance to pick the brain of a bona fide Venture Capitalist. The gist of his argument was that I should join his company for the "equity," to the tune of 50,000 stock options. My problem with the offer? I have no idea what Cosmix does. Ok, well, I know they want to build a search engine, but come on, hasn't this already been done? So they want to build a better search engine? Well, okay, I suppose but how are you going to make money doing that?

The salary was decent and could be characterized roughly as "market." The problem I saw was that the responsibilites they were looking for me to fill were far greater than those associated with any position in the "market." Here's a partial list of the responsibilities I would assume:

• Systems Administrator
• Network Administrator
• Data Center and Facilities Director
  
• Hardware Purchaser
• LAN Administrator
• Security Administrator
• Exchange Administrator (yuck)
  

and the list goes on. Well, fine, I can do a great job at most of those responsibilies and a pretty good job at the rest (okay, except for the Exchange bit). But taking over all that responsibility ought to come with a corresponding increase in salary.

I know what "market" is for these positions. What I had a harder time with was figuring out how much above market one should be compensating for absorbing *all* these responsibilies.

I had some numbers in mind going in. Based on the interview, I revised my numbers upwards to account for the additional time and headaches of dealing with all these issues at the same time.

Still, in the end, Cosmix was stuck at our near my current salary which meant this was going to amount to a lateral move. Yuck.

So, in the end, I said "No thanks."

Now I just have to figure out where I want to eat lunch.

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