Don't ignore delayed rewards when choosing a job
Every job has some immediate rewards:
Salary
Perks
Prestige, or having people be impressed when you say you work at SpaceX.
But every job also has effects on your future, on where you’ll be after you leave this particular job. If you diff the future you against present you, you could find improvements or regressions in multiple facets:
You could develop skills. Quickly in some jobs, like starting a startup. Slowly in others. And some jobs cause your skills to atrophy from disuse. If you’re not developing skills, you’re losing them. Sometimes people take up a job with the explicit intention of not working. This is short-term smart, long-term dumb.
You could be exposed to different job roles (consultant, employee or cofounder) in different types of companies from self-employed to an early-stage startup all the way to Google. These will help you grow in your career. Or you could do the same thing for 15 years, without growing much.
You’ll earn a title and salary, which will result in a higher salary going forward, and higher self-confidence.
Your financial health may improve from a high salary, putting you in a good position to do something riskier after you leave this job. Or your savings might deplete, precluding an option you want to take.
Every job will either improve or diminish your mental health1. Improve, like trusting others and being an effective participant in a high-trust environment, or diminish, like not bothering to take initiative because one of the naysayers in the company will veto it, anyway. In addition to mental health, you’ll also develop habits you’ll take to your next job. A company I worked with hired someone from Tech Mahindra, and he turned out to have a bad attitude, like not listening to anyone’s input and reminding them he’s the boss. Why did he end up this way? He was molded by his previous job. If you work in a bad environment, you’ll end up like him. Nobody is strong enough to resist the effect of one’s environment. The only solution is to put yourself in a good environment.
A job can give you the mental space to work on other areas of your life, like exercising everyday. On the other hand, working in an exploitative company can hurt your health, sometimes irreversibly, as with an engineer whom Amazon worked so hard she got diabetes.
Many people overweight the short-term factors when picking a job. When they leave that job some years later, they find themselves to be in a worse situation than when they started. No different from a person who eats junk food and enjoys it, but ruins his health a few years later.
As Bob Dylan put it,
He who is not busy being born is busy dying.
None of us is strong enough to resistant the effects of our environment. Even rock is moulded by water. So you have to leave if you find yourself in a bad environment and you can’t change it.