https://dillonshook.com/passion-over-profits/ Home Blog Photos Projects [ ] [ ] Light Dark System Home Blog Photos Projects Profile Image of the Author Dillon Shook Autodidact & Zero One Infinity Advocate Location Boston, MA Interests Programming, Photography, Cooking, Game Development, Reading, Guitar, Running, Travel, Never having enough time... Working On fusion energy at CFS This Site Made with Astro, Cloudinary , and many many hours of writing, styling, editing, breaking things , fixing things, and hoping it all works out. Education B.S. Computer Science, New Mexico Tech Contact site at dillonshook dot com Random Read another random indie blog on the interweb Subscribe Get the inside scoop and $10 off any print! Subscribe Tags thoughts game-dev javascript cat-search c-sharp tutorials career entrepreneurship programming testing card-lang interactive jison meta react antipatterns isometric performance predictions More Top Posts Unity Save Game Editor * Nov 2019 What it Takes to Make a Game by Yourself * Sep 2022 Laid Off for the First Time In My Career, and Twice In One Year * Jan 2025 A Critique of React Hooks * Apr 2020 A Critique of React Hooks Addendum * May 2020 572 words ~3min read Passion Over Profits August 14^th 2025 / career / thoughts I'm a little over 4 months into the new job and I think now it's safe to talk about a topic that's been fermenting in my head without risk of jinxing anything at this point. This last time around finding a new job was the first time in the 15 years of my career where multiple offers have actually lined up in spacetime such that I had to decide between them. I'm sure I could have made this happen before if that was the goal but I've always tried to be selective with the companies I apply to. As everyone has already told you I'm sure, this is a great position to be in when negotiating your offer. After a few back and forths with each company I felt pretty good about what each was offering, but on paper one was pretty stacked Offer 1 Offer 2 Salary Baseline Baseline plus even more than a minimum wage salary Some shares, but no Strong chance the company will go Equity near term timeline for public within the year and result in any value a 100k payout Bonus None 5-10% Annual bonus Title Senior Engineer Staff Engineer Commute Hybrid Fully Remote Team Solid group of really Working on "the best dev team the smart engineers company has" And to top it all off, Offer 2 had company offsite coming up I'd be invited to in the Bahamas! Actually Costa Rica, but this is what I imagined Just looking at them side by side, Offer 2 won on pretty much every aspect you can think of. But I still ended up turning it down. There was one thing I was missing from Offer 2 and had in abundance for Offer 1: Passion. As you might know from my other post, Offer 1 was Commonwealth Fusion Systems where I get to work with insanely talented and smart people pushing the frontier of science to try and accomplish something humanity has never done before. I'm so much more passionate about working on futuristic tech solutions to climate change than the normal sort of business that Offer 2 would have me work on. After a certain point, mo' money don't mean mo' happiness. So to think of it another way, by turning down the extra money I effectively bought happiness with money that wouldn't have made me happier. A long time ago I read some career advice (probably from some random reddit post) that boiled down to the fact that job satisfaction comes down to: * The Pay * The Work * The People If you only like 1 (or even worse, 0!) of the 3 you should be spending all your free time looking for a new job or advancing your skills so you can get a better job. If you have 2 you should be casually looking for new opportunities, and if you have all 3, hold on tight! It's obvious enough, but if the pay sucks the rest of your life suffers. If you can't stand the people you work with you're gonna end up miserable, and if you find the work tedious and boring you're going to spend a huge chunk of your life checked out and bored. Each one of these is a spectrum of course, and being passionate about your job is just the strongest version of liking the work you do. I feel incredibly grateful that I not only had the chance to pick between two great outcomes, but also that I was able to land a dream job I'm passionate for. I hope some day you'll get the chance to pick too, and choose your passion! Want the inside scoop? Sign up and be the first to see new posts No spam, just the inside scoop and $10 off any photo print! Subscribe (c) 2025 Dillon Shook. All Rights Reserved. / RSS / Sitemap (c) 2025 Dillon Shook. All Rights Reserved. / RSS / Sitemap