I recently started looking for a more serious job, and I received two strong job offers that I now have to choose between. I'm seriously conflicted, so obviously I should turn to conditional prediction markets to make my decision for me.
The first job, which I will refer to as "Genesis", (not their real name), is a support role for a market trading firm. Some coding, some research, helping design trading strategies, etc. Just doing whatever I'm needed for across several fields.
The second job, which I will refer to as "Penguin", (not their real name either), is systems design work for a B2B fraud detection and prevention firm. Some coding, but more high level pentesting-adjacent stuff; thinking about how their systems could be defeated by sophisticated adversaries and coming up with robust countermeasures.
Both jobs are remote, not particularly time-bound (so I can choose when exactly to work), and full-time but with generous time off.
Genesis pays only a small yearly salary, but has a generous end-of-year bonus that depends on both team and individual trading performance. They've tried to convince me that it will be high (told me the bonus could be more than 3x the base salary in a good year), but without any such stipulation in an actual contract I have to take that skeptically.
Penguin pays with a lower-variance and more clearly-defined structure, about 4/5 in regular salary and 1/5 in equity. I'm a little concerned about the equity since from what I hear it's difficult to sell, but after meeting the company founders and employees I'm bullish on their prospects. (It's a pretty stable company, so I expect neither failure nor explosive growth. I think they'll remain generally successful and grow a bit faster than the overall market.)
The biggest difference is in the intangibles:
Genesis has an extremely fun company culture; several of the employees are already friends of mine, they've invited me to a retreat where the whole company just plays games for a week, etc. Many of them play Magic, many of them use Manifold. Very similar personality types to me, and the company actively encourages this culture.
Penguin is, uh, not fun. They're much more corporate and normal. Not overly bureaucratic or anything; it's absolutely a "get stuff done" culture, I'm encouraged to talk openly and give feedback, and after all they were willing to make an offer to someone whose primary work experience is "Magic judge". But they're not, like, gamers. Company retreats I expect will be "boss who wants people to think he's fun" more than actual fun.
On the other hand, Genesis's work product is just market trading, which strikes me as somewhat... nihilistic. I wouldn't be building anything of value to the world, we're just locked in a zero-sum game against less sophisticated traders. Sure we'll win, but like, ...why are we doing this? (I'm familiar with the "we're allocating capital more effectively" and "we're revealing important information about the future" arguments. This is plausible to me but I'm a little skeptical of factoring in these sorts of second-order effects too strongly.)
Penguin has a concrete mission that I can be proud of; fraud is unambiguously bad, and especially with deepfakes and AI agents on the rise, more cutting-edge tools to combat sophisticated attackers is sorely needed. I would be able to look back and say "I helped build this socially important and valuable thing".
(I plan to donate a large portion of my salary to charity either way, so the direct prosociality of the job can be offset with higher pay. But on a psychological level it's more satisfying to be contributing to the world directly rather than just donating to a distant charity.)
I legit can't decide, but I need to give them an answer very soon. So I turn to the markets. Feel free to ask questions and give advice.
(Details of offers may change as negotiations continue, and answers will resolve based on whatever final offer I accept. I reserve the right to N/A an answer if it turns out that resolving it accurately would violate an NDA or other obligation.)
1,000
3.00Am I the perfect rational being that everyone thinks I am, or secretly just another human susceptible to the same motivated reasoning as everyone else? Gamble on my psychological fortitude: /IsaacKing/will-i-be-radicalized-against-taxes
@IsaacKing If you leave after a week and your total earnings are $8, this resolves NO, right? Or is it N/A because you didn't hit the 5 year mark?
@musteval Good question, not sure the best way to handle that. I'm thinking, N/A if I leave before 1.5 years, otherwise I'll resolve it based on the assumption that I would have continued earning the same amount in the remaining time?
(Oh and I'll count the amount before taxes for simplicity.)
@Eliza Apologies; what were you betting on? I'll try to stick with whatever the most natural interpretation would be, I'm just not sure what that is.
@IsaacKing I was interpreting it as "the actual amount of income you make," so implicitly also a bet on you staying something close to 5 years. (But I bought a bunch of YES on both questions after you clarified.)
@IsaacKing I might be in the minority, but I assumed that as long as you took the job, you would then wait 5 years and add up how much money you got from them, regardless of how much of the 5 years you were actively working for them, etc. (I read that people often leave jobs before 5 years, for whatever reasons).
I can see how you might have had something different in mind, though.
@Eliza Yeah that is more in keeping with the text of the question, you're right. I should have made it conditional on staying if I wanted it to work my way. So I'll go with that: no NA/, resolves based on actual earnings. (However I think it would be fair to count earnings from a different job I move to if the first job was clearly a useful career step towards getting it.)
@musteval, sorry for misinforming you. If it helps, I was able to negotiate a higher pay rate that will resolve it YES within just 3.5 years if I don't leave, so your bets are probably still good value. If you disagree, sell them and I'll compensate you the amount you lost.
@IsaacKing looks like my cost basis for my YES position right now is 30 cents a share, which sounds great to me given those resolution criteria - no need to compensate.
@IsaacKing If you join Genesis but leave before your "first full year" bonus (presumably meaning within ~14 months), does this resolve N/A or 0%?
@strutheo I have pressed them about it a few times; they're unwilling to give guarantees. (Which makes sense, that would defeat the purpose of it being discretionary.)
One aspect I have found a bit concerning is that I've asked them for a rough expected value 4 times over the course of our negotiations, and each time they've given me a higher number than before. This could be because, as my BATNA gets better (Penguin keeps increasing their offer), Genesis plans to make my bonuses higher as a means of outbidding them. But it also could be because they're just telling me what I want to hear, and with no real commitment these numbers could be forgotten about later.
That said, Genesis recruits heavily from Manifold traders and rationalists, I expect word would get around if they had a tendency to misrepresent their compensation. So I'm not too worried about that.
@musteval The original offer from Genesis was a base of 160k. (Though there have been some further discussions with both companies about what they can offer to help me break the tie between them.)