Make Me an Offer I Can't Refuse

Been having a significant amount of interest in my services lately. Just spent about an hour on the phone with a guy I used to work for who is working for another company now. He wants me to work on an implementation team that he's managing - which is way different work for me. I'm used to creating the product, not getting it up and running in a hospital. It would be much easier work for me.

It's going to involve significant travel, and I'm not a big fan of that. I don't mind once or twice a year, but this would be more often. There's two hospitals as beta sites, one in Phoenix (where I'm from originally) and one in some town I've never heard of in New Jersey.

He wants me to take the job right now so I can give notice and be in Phoenix the first week of December. The offer will be landing in my inbox soon, but should be significantly more money than what I'm getting now... plus bonuses and all that.

The company is MiniCorp as opposed the MegaCorp I work for now. I don't dislike MegaCorp, even though they froze raises for a few years while still turning a profit and shit like that. My current manager at MegaCorp is not my favorite, by far, but that's trivial in the equation. I've worked there for some 10 years and I have nearly unlimited job security.

So here's the scenario. The question is.. would you switch jobs?

I'll pick an arbitrary amount.. say you're making $100k. You've got a nice full package of benefits.. good health insurance, matching 401k, 3 weeks vacation a year. Your job is easy, and if you apply yourself, you can probably get your stuff done in about 20 hours, leaving quite a bit of time to web surf and such. Nobody hassles you, and it's just a really good job.

You get an offer from a small company for $120k. They have equivalent health insurance, don't match 401k but do annual bonuses that would more than make up for it. You'll probably work more hours, and have to travel a pretty good amount. You'll be doing something that's pretty easy, and is in fact considered a step below the engineering position you currently have. You only get 2 weeks vacation, but your manager tells you that you can just take a day off here and there when you want to make up for it.

You'd also be cutting out on your current project, where you are the only developer, and the rest of the team will lose their minds if you quit. You'll still be supporting the same client, but in a different division so you could probably help a new guy get situated in your old job.

What do you do? What.. do.. you.. do?

/update

Just got a call from the HR person at MiniCorp.. she says the president of the company has to sign off on offers and he hates back and forth negotiating and wanted to know what would be required for me to say yes. I told her a number, and through some mumbling and grumbling, she had in mind something about 20 grand less. Soooo.. I dunno.

My guess is that they're going to split the difference and make it difficult for me to decide.

I'm not exactly sure how the gov is pricing this stuff anymore. It used to be that they'd assign a contract for.. say.. 4 developers, 3 SQA, 1 project manager, 1 tech writer and so on. Each job would have a fixed price that got billed by the hour. They'd know how much they could pay somebody based on what they were going to be paid by the gov and still make a profit. I think that the gov now awards contracts for the entire bucket of people, so.. just X dollars for the group. You wouldn't be able to determine how much each job was worth, but if you had a cheap tech writer, you could throw somebody else more money.

The other thing is that if I agree to join their company, I'd have to spend a week on the road in early December, and I'm not feeling so hot. What if I changed jobs and all of a sudden my condition is serious, and my health insurance is all fucked up? What if they deny treatment as a "pre-existing condition". I'm pretty confident that I'm not having that serious of a problem.. but the timing just isn't any good.

Ultimately, I guess I'm flattered that other people want me to come work for them. A small company might want to hire me even if they don't make any money off me. When you can offer the gov very highly skilled and experienced engineers who have a reputation, that can make the difference between winning and losing a contract. It's hard to compete with the MegaCorp I work for now because of that.