new job... same as the old job

Well, the whole job thing has resolved itself.

Basically I'm staying exactly where I've always been.

As expected there was a counter-offer from my current employers and I fully expected that they would not be able to meet the offer I had received.  There was a caveat to this in that the offer was for London so that adds more to cost of living, etc.  In other words, to be a comparable offer it didn't need to be the same, but even with that I didn't think they'd match it.

And they didn't.  Not in terms of the pure offer, anyway.  However, there was a "cake later" part to the offer (the majority of both offers being "cake now") and it could, in theory, be a significant slice of cake.

When I started on this road my main drivers were that I didn't feel like my "career" was going anywhere.  In other words it felt like I'd hit a kind of ceiling and being a small company I couldn't go anywhere.

A big part of this was because the person who owns and runs the business would need to retire for anything like that to happen.  Well the cake later relates to the fact that the boss is retiring.

However, the down side to this whole thing is that we're talking about something that will happen in 4 or 5 years and this is the build-up to it.  In other words, by staying, I'm committing to that period of time or I get no cake whatsoever.

How big a slice of cake is the gamble - the risk is that it turns out to be a tiny bit of cake so I'd really have been better off leaving.  This seems unlikely, particularly for me.  I'm the longest serving member of staff outside of the boss and therefore in theory my slice of cake is bigger than anybody else's just be default.  This is counter-acting a bit by the fact I'm technically middle-management, but it's a pretty flat management structure, tbh.

Details of cake small or large are pending, so for now I have simply accepted the counter-offer.  It's a good offer and puts me in the right ball-park of jobs similar to mine.

I've also gotten them to agree to send me on some courses and also to put in place some of the tools and processes we need.  These were basically conditional on me accepting.

Now I just need to come up with a plan for it all!