[widebody911]

A few weeks ago, I converted from a contractor to a 'perm' employee at this company. I'd been a contractor since January. During this time, I'd been talking with a manager at company B where I used to work about a position there, but he wasn't able to get all of the HR hoops jumped through in a timely manner. Well, he finally did, and long story short, he's made me an offer. Now I have to decide whether to bail out of the job I just started, or stay put and see how things pan out. I worked as a contractor at company B for about 8 years; I know the people, I know the environment, although I had not worked for this particular manager. When I was a contractor there, I did get jerked around a bit, but I worked for a completely different organization.

The pay at company B would be identical to what I'm making at company A, and that is the best they ("B") can/will do - I sent him back to his boss 2x to get to this salary point. The benefit packages are roughly similar: company A has a better dental plan, company B has a stock purchase plan.

At "A" I think I'm slightly behind the pay curve for my skillset; at "B" I'd definitely be ahead of the curve. They really want me at "B." I haven't been at "A" that long (almost 8 months) and I think I'll look like a putz by bailing so soon.

The "B" job would be more of an engineering support role, which would be a wide range of SysAdmin duties across a wide range of platforms, with some random coding duties here and there to support that; at "A" I'm implementing and administering an OpenView environment. At "A", I'm utilizing a specialized niche skillset; "B" would be using a wide range of commodity skills. If the market heads in a different direction, would the niche skills still be worth anything? I have concerns about becoming pigeonholed as the OpenView guy, but at the same time, as I improve this niche skill, I could potentially become more valuable. At "B" I'd be a jack of all trades, master of none.

"B" is a (much) more laid back environment, with an almost (but not quite) dot-com flavor. You can take a long lunch and play basketball, hockey, volleyball, etc (and my manager partakes in these activities) and has a kick-ass cafeteria; "A" is more rigid, professional and conservative, and the cafeteria is one step above dumpster-diving at the SPCA. At "A" the dress is biz casual; at "B" as long as you cover your reproductive and feeding organs you're good to go.

"B" is close to the g/f's house, so I could crash there and have a 5 minute commute to work.

"B" has gone through some heavy layoffs over the past few years, and recently bought a competitor, which in real life was a "reverse acquisition" - the new head of this biz unit is the guy who ran the company that was acquired. A lot of their talent was poached by other companies and other business units during the acquisition upheaval, so they're trying hard to get properly staffed again. IMHO, "A" is over-staffed, and there's 2 new hires on the way. Key people are over-worked, while others kind of coast.

At "A", I'm about 3/4 of the way through the implementation; this is the fun stage, where everything is in place and you're adding functionality and getting pieces intermingled. Unfortunately, once the implementation is done, the day-to-day babysitting crap will probably be boring as hell; normally I just do the installation and initial config, collect my check and I'm outta there. "B" has a backlog of work that will have me buried from the get-go, which will mean I have less time to bash the NeoCons on Pelican.

At "A" my manager is an old-school techie who moved up through the ranks to manager; he understands the technology and what we do, and you can't baffle him with BS - I like that. The "B" manager is a new-school MBA type, although the other people I know who work for him say he stays out of the way for the most part. However, I don't think he'd recognize a shared memory segment if you dropped it on his toe.

At both, I'd have a decent amount of automony, but at "A" I'd have to participate in an on-call rotation. With "A" I get a BlackBerry and a laptop; "B" gives out their own brand of PDA, which is (IMHO) is inferior.

I have to give him my decision on Monday.