> I accepted. Despite the downlevelling, despite the fact that compensation was well below market, Shopify was a big step for me. There are lots of good reason

> I accepted. Despite the downlevelling, despite the fact that compensation was well below market, Shopify was a big step for me. There are lots of good reasons to leave companies fast if they aren't a fit, but this statement was almost everything I needed to know. The author started the job feeling undervalued precisely because he didn't have negotiating skills on the comp package on the way in, and then had his feelings confirmed, possibly by presenting as someone who believes they are undervalued (which is as attractive to be around as it sounds) but also, shopify's HR reps saw the poor bargaining position and offered him even less (a downleveled position) and he still took it. (Note to recruiters and HR people, if you make people feel either over or undervalued on the way in, they're going to act that way, and then you're going to be mystified wondering why your culture is broken - but in this case the author left so much on the table, I'll direct this to him.) I'd posit the author left because his professional negotiating skills aren't mature, and in their current state, they're producing poor and disadvantaged deals and relationships. I'm not going to take it so far as to say that the author has that rare martyrly quirk that they seek out disadvantaged relationships because it keeps them feeling righteous and justified - but not setting and signalling boundaries on what you will personally accept, and then blaming others for offering you what you don't want is within sight of the horizon of that anti-pattern. I learned this in a much harder way, but even putting it charitably still feels like it has a hard edge. It's not intended that way. The implied expectation was that he was "senior," and good at what he does, and independent of what he might be able to do for the company, this by itself demands some kind of consideration. Like when someone says they have a master's degree and wants an extra 30% salary for it, but the degree is in some kind of theory. I interpret that the author may have been indexed on counterfactuals about reciprocity and value going into the negotiation. It's great to mature as a developer or a hacker, but after a point, there are also diminishing marginal returns on investing in those skills, and making big expensive sacrifices for those skills seems like a substitute for taking risks for success, and this doesn't have anywhere near the yield that reading a book on negotiations or sales wouldn't return in a few hours. Sure, get Shopify on your CV, become the best <foo> developer you can, I'd even love to work for them, and though I know I too moralize my own blindspots, in this case, I'd posit this was a negotiations failure between the author and the Shopify recruiters.