I declined the on-site interview. They said the salary range is 90-100, maybe 110k. I told them truthfully that I could not see it working out for less than 140k. I have closed salary gaps before, but $40k is not a salary gap, it's a salary. Even if I did get them to stretch that far, the folk wisdom in the industry is that doing that makes you the first layoff target.
Still, declining an expenses-paid interview is not good salesmanship, because the smart thing is always to accept the interview, even for practice, and to make contacts, and be very enthusiastic, and then try to negotiate higher. Without the on-site interview, there's no way they are going to come up on the salary for someone they never met. Also, at my last company I did not get the first job, but they were inspired to call me back a couple weeks later for a different job that I took. When I put it this way, I'm kicking myself in the butt for not siezing possible opportunities, in violation of my "stochastic hill-climbing" method of career planning.
But, the three good reasons I did decline are 1) I'm very busy this quarter with travel 2) When company ownership changes in February, all my PTO is paid out, so I would effectively forfeit 3 days pay to make the trip, which would be more expensive for me than the trip expenses would be for them and 3) I don't want to live that far from family, and pastor says to stop chasing money. My bil turned down a $40k raise to move a couple hundred miles, for family reasons, so I would feel bad moving across the country.
Although me and my wife are both in the mood for a big move. I think we are nomads. We don't so much settle in anywhere, as eventually get sort of bored with anywhere. An exception was Dallas. That almost became "home", but we were there 7 years too.
Oregon is the only West-coast state I could live in. I have told 3 recruiters this year that I simply won't move to California for all the tea in China, and I invite them to call me back if the company ever establishes facilities in a free state. I wonder how often they hear that.
