Yes, but one million dollars just seems like a huge sum to give up for one project to me. I'm not saying they made the wrong choice, it's just one I can't see myself making. $1M is a decade of $100k a year. Money might not be /everything/ but that's a pretty comfortable life while you work on other projects or hold another job with no fear of running into serious financial problems as long as you don't do something ridiculous.
I feel the same way with the majority of these "I turned down their offer" stories. I admire them, but $1M (even across 4 years), to me is a lot of money. Enough to fund a new project and then maybe I'd think about turning down future potential buyouts having the financial stability.
A big chunk of that $1m will be gone to taxes, as someone in another comment has already mentioned.
Also the taxes at the time were much higher; so the impressive $1m starts to look much less impressive when you add in the fact that it probably vested over a very long term and that he was going to be put to work on something he didn't like for a long time.
It's classic cognitive dissonance - they realize they made the wrong choice, so expend energy and time justifying it and explaining how they made the right choice every chance they get, as though eventually they will convince themselves. And they probably will, in time.
Sorry, but no. It was the wrong choice financially, but the right choice for my emotional well-being. I also reasoned about regrets years down the road -- I'd probably regret not having tried my own thing.
And I don't explain this "every chance [I] get". I think about it rarely, and discuss it even less. I've done well enough financially that giving up the Microsoft cash just doesn't matter. I just mention it here because it seemed relevant to the topic at hand.
You really don't know if you made "the right choice" for your emotional well-being because you can only see one of any number of possible outcomes.
If you'd have gone with Big Bad Microsoft, a lot of things could have happened. At the instant of deciding - you could have learned how to make decisions based less on emotions and more on logic. You could have helped change the company culture instead of being relatively ineffectual. I wonder - what has your hate-based (I assume) decision really changed for anybody outside of a small Boston startup?
Being neither Vulcan nor omniscient, just human, I had to make a decision with imperfect information, and my instincts did play a role in that decision. Improving Microsoft corporate culture was not my goal. Improving the world was not my goal. My goal was to work on software that I was driven to write, using technology that I enjoyed using, and to provide a comfortable life for my family. I did all of those things.
I don't "hate" Microsoft, but combining what I knew of myself at the time, with what I observed at the company, I concluded that I would be happier elsewhere.
> You really don't know if you made "the right choice" for your emotional well-being because you can only see one of any number of possible outcomes.
The technology for that is not available yet.
It's interesting to speculate what would happen if everyone had perfect knowledge of the ultimate outcome of every decision and optimized them for their own goals. It would be a completely different world.
It's phenomenal how some people believe they know what is and was best for everyone else based on their own assumptions. He made a decision you wouldn't have, under conditions you weren't in based on priorities you clearly don't agree with and having had different experiences than you, but hey, because he didn't take the money, he's wrong.
I used to think this way, and that saddens me... I hope you get over it, too, and realize that other people want and do different things, and not only are they rarely categorically wrong or right, even if you consider them as such, that is your opinion, and it's no more valid or invalid than someone who does something of which you do not approve and comes away from it satisfied.
