In the end, I took the research job. Especially because they broke their own salary cap in the offer and hit my threshhold for "requires absolutely no cuts at all other than stopping throwing money down a hole", a.k.a. get a more reasonable insurance plan.

I'll be staying in Redmond, and now instead of a software tester at the Evil Empire, I'll be developing a wide and creative variety of things for a grant-funded not-for-profit cancer research institute in Seattle. I didn't even let the other interviews I was in the middle of finish; I've already handed in my decision, and stopped the other interview processes.

I'm not sure why I'd been considering the other jobs. This was a matter of "here is a job that is everything you wanted: academia; a real chance to improve the state of the art of computer science, algorithmically, because this work will be published; a chance to make people suffer less by helping the research succeed; enough money to live comfortably off of". Throwing it away for a high-stress job requiring me to move cross-country to a city with worse air quality seems ridiculous, even with the compensation differences.

I've offered to start tomorrow. It's kind of late in the day to sort that out, though; I suspect I'll be back to work extremely soon, at any rate.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/467680.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/467680.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own.