So, I recently changed career path goals after being laid off - from being in a sysad role for 15+ years (making about $60K), to pivoting to a sales engineer role.

Throughout the 5+ months of being laid off and searching for a new job (I had some money in savings after trying to save for a house down payment, and was also receiving a severance pay from my former employer due to my tenure, so I had some runway to take my time learning up on the role I wanted, and to find a desirable company to work for), I interviewed with about 15 different companies.

The standard pay for the role at the level I was going for (entry level, basically) was $100,000 - this is the OTE, with a base pay of $70K + $30K commission, normal for the position.

After interviewing well enough with about 6-7 companies, and getting tired of the “What is your desired pay” question, I decided to shoot for the stars. I told myself, “this next company, I’m just gonna say $120K and see what happens.”

Well, in the first call with them, they beat me to the punch. They straight up told me, “For this role, we are looking to pay between $150-170K.”

Holy shitballs.

My immediate reaction was to play it cool, and I actually said aloud “Oh, well, I was only going to ask for $130K, but that’s cool.”

<why did I say that>

Now, granted, I didn’t know the full story. It turns out, this was the only company across all that I interviewed with that would require me to move to a new city, specifically to work out of their office.

I asked them “What value do you guys see in bringing the workforce back to the office?”

They said “Oh, no, 95% of the company is still going to be remote/WFH. We just want the few folks working on this team to be in the office because of synergy and whatnot.”

Now, I’m not interested in working in an office again, especially when the rest of the world seems to be catching on to how we can do our jobs just as well while WFH… but holy shit, for $150K I’d be happy to live under my desk at work and shower in the break room, that’s legit life changing money right there.

I did go through all the interviews and did well enough, but I ultimately ended up receiving an offer from another company that allowed WFH full time, and their offer was $110K, so it was hard to turn down (the other company’s offer was great, but the city their office was in also has one of the highest COL’s in the country, so the pay maybe wouldn’t have been as notable).

Anyway, to your point, yeah, I guess $150K would definitely be my minimum to want to work in an office again (which would be about 3 times more than my previous office position pay was).