There is some debate. Some people call unpaid leave beach time and paid leave bench time, but when it was explained to me they called the paid leave beach time.

@ Marie

Pay versus job satisfaction is always an issue. i love to blog, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I like technical writing enough that I am willing to do it to pay the bills.

@ Jeanne

I am a hard negotiator and it has helped me a few times, but I have negotiated myself out of jobs before too. Sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t.

Your experience sounds very familiar!

Interesting expression: “beach time.”
At first I thought it was a typo because I’ve always heard it called “bench time,” meaning that you are sitting on the bench waiting for the next job.

Maybe all those people sitting on the bench said, “Screw this, I’m going to the beach.”

And so the language evolved.

Regarding pay and job choice: I’m fortunate that I only once had to take a cut in pay when changing jobs, and it was a small amount. My husband twice took big cuts in pay (30 to 45%) when he moved from private sector to public sector jobs. In both cases, the benefits of lower stress level and greater intrinsic value in the public sector jobs far outweighed the loss in income. We are realistic: we want to save money as well as pay bills, but, at least in our experience, there seems to be a point of diminishing returns with the more salary we make. The choice often is not how much $$ we’ll make at a given job, but how much we’ll enjoy that given job.

Now, if you can command a high salary and enjoy what you do … that’s really sweet!

The day of your interviews certainly seemed to be your day! Isn’t it nice to be so popular? It’s great, too, the way you leveraged that first offer into a higher salary at the second job! You’re obviously an expert negotiator!

Jeanne

It isn’t that frequent, and usually applies to consultants who do a lot of high-dollar work for multiple clients. I was lucky enough to start out at a firm that did a lot of that type of work, even though I was a relatively low-paid member of the team.

Tony Chungs last blog post..Days like these

Thank you. Eventually we will discuss a much more difficult and stressful negotiation. I’ve been in this situation more than once, and it seemed to get worse every time.

@ James

It was quite a strange day, but it was nice to be in demand after such a long stretch of nobody showing any interest.

@ Chris
Thank you for the offer. I don’t have anything negative to say about Speedware, but it isn’t a product I use currently. I’ll certainly be discussing that later.

@ Amy

Thanks for the kind words and congratulations on picking up so much work because of a single conversation. That was great to hear.

PS, Thanks for the link on my post about finding work.

Amy Derbys last blog post..How I Scored Two New Freelance Blogging Jobs While Waiting For a Train