A colleague of mine, a computer programmer, was recounting his midyear review with his supervisor recently. He was a bit astounded that the best thing his supervisor said he did during the period was to bring some work in for three of his colleagues. (He overheard another one of my colleagues saying. during a phone conversation, that he had all of this money but no one to do the work.) He wasn't really praised for the fantastic job he did with coding, but for the fact that he brought in more business for his company.
When I pointed out to him that he was directly generating revenue for his employer and that that is where the real money jobs are most places (like Michael Masterson teaches in Automatic Wealth) he responded facetiously, “You know, that's exactly what I told them at my interview: ‘Man, you know what? I can bring you in a ton of business! Forget this training I got as a computer programmer! I'll just sneak around looking for chances to bring more business to the company!'”
He's a funny guy and a great person. He also really likes what he does, and admitted that he'd be bored to tears being on the sales end.
And that's fine! A job that you love is worth a lot. Money isn't everything.
But how much extra would get you to change your mind? As an example: I'm not a morning person. I like wearing jeans. And now I can get in pretty much whenever I want as long as I don't have a meeting, and it's not mandatory that I wear even business casual. I'd certainly reconsider, though, if faced with an offer of twice as much money but with it being at a different job with different responsibilities, dress code, and hours.
Making this much more money is not out of the question, but one of the most straightforward ways to do this is to position yourself so that you can directly bring a lot of money to your employer. This may mean changing jobs to something that you don't love doing right now. The question, then, is whether you can love it enough so that you can do the new, better-paying job well.
My friend is happy doing what he's doing, and that's fine. I saw his supervisor's comments as a clue as to what's important in his eyes. But that doesn't mean that the clue has to be pursued if it's going to lead to a dead-end job that isn't worth getting up for in the morning.
How much more would you need to be paid to change your job?
Depends on what I'd have to change it to. If my employer wanted me to be a salesman…well, I won't say all the money in the world wouldn't cut it, but pretty close. I hate sales. I only do it in my own business because…well, it's my own business, so the buck stops here…especially until I can afford to hire a full-time salesman. 🙂
On the other hand, if my "day" job wanted me to change over to writing code, instead of system administration…well, I'd do that for a 50% raise. At least long enough to get my house paid off and the business off the ground for real.
Likewise if they asked me to switch to a daytime shift (unlikely, since for some unknown reason they have trouble finding sysadmins willing to work midnights). For an extra $20K/yr I'd do that…at least long enough to save up a decent chunk of change so I could then quit without immediately having to worry about finding another job.
Honestly, the amount of raise I'd require in order to make a major change is basically the amount of raise I'd need in order to be able to quit the job and reverse that change before it drove me nuts. Plus some extra for the hassle value. I would not ever make a permanent change of that kind just to get more money from an employer, no matter how much money they offered. I'd always be negotiating with an eye to how much the raise would shorten the time until I could afford to quit.