From your posting and related knowledge, i feel like you could do better than either of those

New job sounds better but neither sound great. I'd be inclined to take the office job since remote is not your preference and it's a pretty important factor in job happiness.

I'd like to think that but have blown 3 on sites in a row with "cool" software companies somehow. I'd hope that its a factor of my age (40, and I'm always the oldest in the room) and my relative disinterest in spending more than 2-3 hours on your stupid take home code test that really needs about 10 hours to do fully. Or maybe I suck IDK.

thanks

Blown meaning failing coding tests or just didnt get the job?

I'd like to hear some stories. Did you hit a wall in some whiteboard stuff or struggle to come up with answers? Feel it went well but just didn't get the job?

2nd option in a heartbeat, but then again i'd go insane WFH more than 1 day at a time

also es5 is uke:

Just didn't get the job no reason given but clearly wasn't "jiving" with these people I guess? Not sure really, pretty ticked about the last one with the 10 hour code challenge and being questioned about why I didn't have unit tests and full error handling states and caching and I'm like thinking "I don't work for free" but I guess what they were really looking for is some guy/gal to get their requirements and just knock them all out of the park.. but that's not going to me. All of those were "bonus" requirements to the real application btw which was to make a SPA that pulled info from the (rate limited!) github api.

Interview at place giving me an offer was probably best interview I've ever given and clearly everyone liked me and I crushed their coding challenges which were just me being given a laptop and connected to like 5 fiddles on common front end stuff. But I was only older than 3/5 people this time..

Worked in finanancial services for 12 years in NYC. While the work can be interesting, I'd be amazed if it was a 5 day/week job - unless it's 14hr days.

Interesting just kind of assumed it was mostly products that have been around forever i.e. customers log in and look at their portfolios and ****, nothing critical that would require long hours. Obviously I have another call coming up to discuss that.

Just did my second phone interview with Google. First 2 questions were easy. Third one, I couldn't even get a brute force solution or an approach. What do you guys do when you just **** your pants? Going to wait for that dreadful "thanks but no thanks" phone call from the recruiter tomorrow.

Are you in the Bay Area?

I really prefer algorithm questions than the bull**** take home tests. Algorithms questions are short and sweet.

"financial company" means different things to different people. If you were getting involved in a NYC finance sweatshop I think it would probaby be more obvious from the interview. Questions like "how comfortable are you eating meals at your desk. As in: breakfast, lunch and dinner" or "after work heavy drinking: alone or with your work bros" etc.

Major city in the midwest. Offer company is a fortune 500 "financial planning" company, not a bank. After work heavy drinking is with wife until she goes to bed then mostly while playing hearthstone.

I remember how friggin' hilarious this was back in 2012:

http://html9responsiveboilerstrapjs.com/

At some point, the joke is just... old.

Grue, #2 AINEC.

I originally thought it was two job offers. Didn't know it was "current job" vs "new job". Anyways, it really depends on what you want for your career. If you are okay with cruising through with #1 and milking it till the end, then I don't see why not.

#2 just kind of sucks with no benefits but since you are living in someplace not SF/LA/NYC/Seattle, I guess it's good.

For you #2. More pay, different technical challenge where it appears that you can claim experience with different technologies.

For me I might be tempted to stay with one. I like working at home. I use NeverSleep for Skype LOL. Getting a chance to do side projects like you do would be very appealing.

Regarding the 1.75x direct rate for contracting, I am constantly getting called about contracting jobs. The 1.75x direct rate isn't coming close. From my experience, the 1.75x direct rate is a good guideline. My summary, rates are low.

Programmer shortage seems to be an urban myth.

Nobody needs healthcare until they do.

Wife has healthcare plan/works at giant health place obv.

How long have you been at your current company? It sounds to me like you'd benefit from a change of scenery regardless of whether the new job is any good. Despite your age, I think you're still fairly early in your career so it's far more important that you get to work on something that's engaging enough for you to learn a lot from, than to worry about 10-20% difference in pay. If you can get health insurance through your wife, the main other thing you're missing out on is probably 401k so you can probably value that accordingly. It doesn't sound like you'd benefit from staying for a long time in any one job anyway so 1-year contract thing probably is not a main problem.

Sounds like #2 is a slam dunk.

The pay formula:

I've been contacted a few times from recruiters for the one job over the past 5 months. The opening question is always "Would you like to work at [Big Corp you heard of?]"

They then go on to explain that they are looking for a PostgreSQL DBA who can do all the standard DBA things, but of course this is a Big Co and they have legit Big ****ing Data, so you have to know a bunch of non-standard Big ****ing Data stuff for PostgreSQL... oh, and can you do Cassandra and GraphQL?

The job is on a 6 month contract and you can either stay in Austin or move to San Jose, no relo assistance available.

The pay is $45 / hour.

I haven't heard from a single short-term contract position that follows this formula, and I've been contacted for Clojure, Postgres, Haskell, Erlang, and all other sort of odd tech. If I say $70 / hour, they stutter, pause and say something about the client being willing to go to $53.50 / hour. Seems the trend, for me anyways, is pay below market rate for very difficult work.

There's a reason these jobs at below market rate are available.