$5,000 For My Soul

The laptop is in the workshop. With any luck, it should come back with the banding issue fixed. Am writing this from a free terminal somewhere in the airport.

Just came out from the interview (yes, the spotty employment history came up). The position was apparently not for the principal as the recruiter made it out to be, but just another SI, which is even further down the food chain after taking into account the distributors. Pay would’ve come up to 5k with commission and incentives, but I came out of the interview with massive cognitive dissonance.

Having held a position of similar responsibilities in the past, I understood that if you’re not the principal, it almost always comes down to price when winning the account or closing the deal. I asked if the SI I was interviewing with had any pricing advantage when it comes to beating down the competition, and effectively, the response I got was that the pricing advantage would come when you rub the distributors the right way, feed them well, and make them feel special. I think this is what most people mean when they talked about being a corporate whore.

The amusing part came after the first interviewer saw me. He was arranging for a second interviewer to come in when he gave me some ‘tips’ on how to handle the second interviewer.

“Just tell her that your sales target in the previous company was 1mil.”, he said.

It wasn’t, but the question didn’t come up with the second interviewer. I think I impressed her enough though, since she said she’ll arrange for a third interview with the CEO of the company.

But I don’t think I’ll take it up. The choice is now between being nice and telling them I don’t want the job, or being a bastard letting them offer first then turn it down. The difference, of course, being the fact that I get to find out how much I’m worth in the current job market.

But no matter how much, not 5K, not 10K, will be enough to make me accept that anything else other than objective value is par for trade. Not favours, not lies.

Not ever.

update: turned it down.