To get me to switch jobs, it'd take ...

The work I do comes in one to two month spurts from clients coming in to hire us. You could say I'm like a contractor. For this reason, it'd be hard to lure me away from where I work because the other employer would have to increase the pay by that much and guarantee that I wouldn't have unpaid downtime... which they really cannot do. Where I work now they try really hard to keep the work coming in and they've been applaudingly successful.

Although I can be bought, my employer has earned enough of my loyalty to the price would have to be really high. Yeah, I know that's a contradiction, but frankly anybody with a family to support has a price-tag. Actually that's probably why 'steady' is more valuable to me than 'more'.

18 months ago, I was solidly "What, and leave all my friends behind?"

Then all my friends got laid off or contracts not renewed. Well, my technical friends. So now I'm the lone tech guy in a sea of Business Analysts, and my manager-of-the-month introduces me as the all around tech guy.

My job search is on the back burner as I complete a Masters degree, which means I'm not reaching out but I do return calls (which come daily, thanks to the lay-offs which dispersed my friends so I now have contacts at most of the companies hiring in the area).

While I'm looking for a 10% (at least) bump, I voted one single penny.

I'm a public servant who works in Defence (not the US DoD though, hence the 'c' instead of an 's'). My primary specialty is FPGA work, among other things. I'm not paid as much as I would be if I was working in the private sector, but from what I've seen around me it'd take a significant pay rise for me to want to leave, for the following reasons:

(1) I work reasonable hours, with a reasonable level of flexibility. Almost everyone else I've seen in Engineering in the private sector works very long hours. I like having spare time at the end of the day.

(2) We have great representation from a variety of unions. Even if you're not part of one, there's enough influence to ensure we get treated fairly and aren't taken advantage of as a collective.

(3) It's not a toxic work environment. By that I mean, I don't have to worry about someone trying to bully me, or get me fired, or try to have to compete with others in a dirty manner to appear the better individual for a promotion (promotions work differently in the public sector). It's just... a nice place to be in.

(4) There aren't too many places where I live which have a use for an FPGA specialist. I don't want to move if I can help it.

So yeah. So long as I get a comfortable wage, the desire to obtain more money is less important that actually enjoying the work and not dreading every work day.

Likewise. For me, it's not so much about the benefits as the work. I'm a research scientist. I could get a 50% pay increase by going into consulting, but I'd be doing less interesting work, and in a more stressful work environment.

Then, too, are lifestyle issues. To switch jobs and stay in my field, I'd need to move to another city. So before any other considerations, my spouse would have to agree to move with me... which would mean he'd have to be satisfied he could find a good job in the destination city as well. Besides that, we'd both have to agree on the desirability of the new city (I'd like to move to the tropics; he thinks it's already too hot in our cool temperate location. I'd like to move to a city a little bigger than where we live now; he'd like somewhere about the same size, if not smaller). And then, we'd have to agree that it was worth uprooting ourselves and our mortgage and establishing a new social circle.

So after all that, realistically... double my current pay and we'll talk.

Fastest way to get a raise, Start shopping for a new job. Screw being loyal to your job, they are not loyal to you.

As an engineer in a non-air conditioned shop, I can tell you that we lose guys all the time to other shops with air conditioning. We have a huge shop with high ceilings, so air conditioning it may not be practical. On the other hand, portable individual air conditioning units exist which blow a 6" duct of cold air onto the worker, and we don't even have those.

I don't have to deal with the heat, being in a (mostly) air conditioned office, but the penny-wise, pound foolish attitude of my employer is discouraging and I would leave in a second.

This matters. I would not jump ship for even a 100% pay increase if it meant going to a job with a medium or higher risk of losing it through no fault of my own.
In today's job market with an official unemployment rate of 8-10% (and a real rate around twice that), having a stable job with decent benefits in a non-volatile company is a godsend.

I was expecting the poll to be about how much of a pay cut you would take to work at a job you enjoyed more than your current job. Or does everyone on Slashdot already work at their dream job?

Who about those of us who actually get less than we could elsewhere but get a lot of job satisfaction?

To annoy certain people, let me explain where I work. I work for the British National Health Service. I have been told that I could get more money in some other jobs but I really enjoy working here and believe in the idea of universal health care. I do not work with patients. I work in IT and am here to help the people who do look after patients.

We get less than 1/3 of the money per patient that your health 'care' systems do. I like to think that I am doing my part to make all this work and hope to stay working for the NHS for a long time. I am not a hippy and would love to be rich. I just think that there are more important things.

I'm working for a CERN experiment (which 99% of the time means what it means for me, I work at a home institute to do CERN related work). It's one of the experiments (CMS) that just announced the discovery of a new particle (likely the Higgs boson) and I was part of the gang who actually worked at least part time over the years on Higgs searches so I can claim a small bit of discovery like everyone else in the experiment.

There's no way in hell that I'd change jobs now. Possibly from one institute to another, but I don't really see why I would as right now I have a permanent position (even though I'm only 30), ability to travel pretty much as much as I want and have a nice home for my family just outside the city. Changing institutes would mean moving to another country or permanently to CERN, which even for double the pay wouldn't balance out for me.

It'd have to be orders of magnitude higher salary (and I'm earning much more than the average researcher or even IT expert does in my country) AND an interesting job for me to even contemplate this. And it would take more than 50% salary cut for me to even start looking for alternatives and in those cases probably as part time job so that I can continue doing what I do right now.

I Voted 30% myself. But really it still depends if it is worth it. If you really like your job, and you can support yourself and your family, the extra money may not be worth it.

I recently got a new job at 20% more. I liked my old job, however I was struggling to support my family. They were too many things that needed repairs that I couldn't afford to fix, asked my boss for my Bonus he said, sorry times are too tough for a bonus. So I looked for a better paying job, and I got one. Do I like my new job more then the old one? Not really, but the extra money for myself and my family is worth it.

You hit the nail on the head, there was a great tv program I watched recently talking about people who end up filing for bankruptcy, and one of the comments was something like: "This is a family making $180,000 a year, and filing for bankruptcy, and when the financial guys explain to them that they can't afford the cars, ski-doo, etc, they panic, they consider those things a minimum for them, they feel they are poor without them...."

The word "poor" is like "cold"; it's very relative to where you live, your choices, and what external stimulii affect your understanding of the word.

As a kid, I grew up in a lot of fishing and mining communities, I have seen poor (poor is when you tear part of your house down to burn to stay warm in the winter, where you have 5 or 6 cars parked in the backyard and hope one of them starts to get you to work and/or you can scrap enough parts from them to keep one going, where 3 or 4 generations of families are living under one roof (with only 3-4 bedrooms too), where you keep your socks on at night since the first person up in the morning has to load the fire into the fireplace to warm up the house, and on and on.... This was all in Canada less than 30 years ago!

The funny part is, I knew people in all the above conditions (and even lived in a few of them myself as a kid), and yet I never heard them talk about being poor, or even acting poor, and, I never considered myself poor as a kid either. Now, jump ahead 30 years and my father-in-law thinks I am not "providing" for my family since I refuse to have cable TV in the house... He has satelite tv with all the features ($100+ per month easy) and yet he doesn't watch TV (sorry, if he remembers, he watches one show (I think it is one of the law-and-order type shows) once a week). I'm guessing that a HUGE percentage of what we call poor is nothing more than perception (caused mostly by advertising), and thus poor is relative.....

My dad did something like that. When he became 72 they stopped paying him and he started collecting retirement, but they let him keep his office. He'd planned on working until the satellite his experiment was on died and he had analyzed all the data, but the damned thing lasted longer than he did.

This job switching stuff was a lot easier when I was single... Back then, it was just a matter of "Does the job sound like fun?" and/or "Does it pay better than what I make now?"

With a family with 3 kids, it's so much more complex. We've got two "special needs" kids on the autistic spectrum with ADD/ADHD. Relatively mild issues compared to some -- but still makes their school a big consideration. If I got paid even 60% more, but it required moving to an area where the schools were questionable -- it might be a deal-breaker for us (especially considering all the other hassles of moving to a new area).

Plus, in our case, my wife and I both have our mothers still alive and willing to lend a hand with watching the kids. Relocating means giving up that benefit too -- and when you price out the cost of a babysitter or nanny these days, that can be significant!

If I stick to only local jobs? My options are pretty limited, and I've had more than one time where I interviewed for a job, made it to almost the end where it was down to me vs. one other candidate, and didn't get it. And not that much later? Turns out the place restructured things or had financial issues or ?? and that job went away anyway. So I'd rather have a paycheck every 2 weeks that I feel reasonably sure is going to be there for a little while than jumping into a complete unknown where they SAY you'll make a little more.

From "Fight Club": the things you own end up owning you. I don't make a habit of building philosophies upon movies, but that quote is so true. When you own a lot of stuff, you have to keep it somewhere. You have to maintain it. You have to upgrade it. Taken to the extremes, you end up spending a lot of your life on just having... stuff. There are quite a few people who reject the idea [guynameddave.com] and advocate paring your possessions down to a minimum.

I'm not quite in that group but I definitely empathize with them. Personally, I've gone the route of keeping fewer, nicer things. I have a few really good shoes. Some nice, well-fitting clothes. A really nice laptop. Decent furniture. An older vehicle in excellent condition. Rather than collect a load of junk, I'd rather surround myself with a smaller number of things that I truly enjoying having.

As it turns out, it's also a lot cheaper to own a few really nice things than a lot of junk. My budget easily covers the things I truly want after ignoring the things I've just been told that I should want.

There no such thing as loyalty in the business world. Even if your boss feels he owes his employees some kind of "loyalty", there's no way he's ever going to dig into his pocket to cover his employees' butts, especially if he has a family like you. If he doesn't have to dig into his pockets, then he has no reason to screw over his employees. So, loyalty doesn't figure into the equation.

When times are good, loyalty only serves to keep people at a below market wage (usually it's just an excuse for people too complacent to move on with their careers). When times are bad loyalty won't be there to save your butt. At best it'll just lead to hurt or conflicted feelings.

Of course, there's no need to be mean to your boss or coworkers. People conflate loyalty with being upfront and reasonable about work life. In other words, they conflate personal and professional relationships. A boss who appears loyal--like asking everyone to take pay cuts to save everybody's job, including himself--is almost certainly just being a good manager or smart entrepreneur. Layoffs and new hires are incredibly expensive, in terms of money and time. Companies don't do it very often not because they're loyal, but because they like money.

This is key.

I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains for a while, and accepted a job in San Bruno. Commuting 100 miles a day might seem crazy to a bunch of people here, but when you're doing it along some amazing motorcycle roads, it starts to sound pretty plesant. It improves when the employer has a 10:00 start time, avoiding pretty much all traffic. It gets even better when there is a commute reimbursement program.

I know a bunch of people who will happily ride 50 miles on the freeway just to get to my commute.

I see this very often. Once you have a family to support, priorities change drastically and it becomes all about stability rather than interest or self-fulfillment. I see a lot of people stuck in horrible jobs, abused by their employers, working crushingly high work loads, and terrified to even look for work because they're worried they'll be fired. In this economy, that can be synonymous with losing your house and worse. And employers KNOW this and will consequently treat you like crap more and more until you burn out or break down.

Good for you you made the decision based on being a good parent.

I'd never wanted kids because I'd not like to have them anchoring me down to one location, and being a drag on my lifestyle (traveling, fun hobbies, fast cars, loose women...etc). I know I'd not be happy if I'd had kids and possibly even resentful for them having curtailed the fun in my life. Sure I'd get the benefits of having kids...but when balanced out in my mind....it just isn't worth it.

Then again..comes to your experience. If someone asks me "hey, do you miss having kids"...how would I know? I know I like my life so far and really enjoy it....I see what other friends have to do and go through with kids, and just isn't something I'd want to do. I am the cool "uncle" or even real godfather to many of my friends' kids....and that's plenty enough for me.

But if you have them...be prepared to sacrifice for them, that is parental responsibility..something I see being shirked way too much these days.

Congrats..sounds like ya'll ARE a responsible set of parents.

And..... that's why I work where I am now. It's run like a business, but is a lot more friendly and the owner actually cares about the employees. Times are tough, as in many industries, but with sparingly few exceptions everyone is sticking around and working harder. Nobody is abused, nobody is yelled at, nobody is treated like crap everyday. Occasional disagreements, but they're resolved and the environment is fairly stress and negativity free.

That's why %50 is not remotely enough. I learned a long time ago that work environment trumps pay every single time. Biggest mistake young people make is putting up with that shit in the first place instead of just finding a way out and leaving. A horrible work environment takes a toll on your health, and affects your life outside of work quite a bit.

I'm thankful everyday I get to work with the people I do.