Twice the pay can still be the worse offer when the role stops building the craft that makes you valuable. The useful comparison is not this month’s salary against next month’s salary, but the income, skills, and options each path could produce over the next two years.
At 4:47 on Friday, Tunde was still at his desk in Lagos, moving a checkout button three pixels to the left, when the offer appeared. Tunde is an invented composite, drawn to make the decision concrete: a product designer with six years of work behind him, a careful eye for interaction details, and a habit of sketching user flows on folded sheets of paper.
The new company would pay twice his current salary. It also wanted his answer before Monday.
There was a catch buried beneath the title. Most of his week would go into client presentations, delivery coordination, and checking whether other people had completed their tasks. He would retain “design oversight,” but somebody else would do the design.
The number that made every objection sound small
Tunde opened his banking app, then the offer again.
Twice the pay could clear obligations he had carried for months. It could create breathing room for his family and give him savings that did not disappear after one difficult week. Telling him to ignore that would be easy advice from someone who did not have to live with the consequences.
Still, the money made weak explanations sound convincing. “Design oversight” could mean shaping product direction. “Client exposure” could widen his network. “Leadership” could prepare him for a bigger role.
Or he could spend eighteen months producing status decks while the interaction skills he had fought to develop went unused.
That was the bad ending on the table. If he declined, the current company could stall, cut staff, or simply fail to raise his pay. If he accepted, he might later discover that recruiters no longer saw a product designer. They might see a coordinator who once designed products.
By Saturday afternoon, neither choice looked safe.
I have seen the same structure in founder decisions. A contract arrives with enough cash to extend runway, but the work pulls the team away from the product it meant to build. The arithmetic looks obvious until you price the direction change. That tension also sits underneath the spending column that could have forced us to build a different company.
Separate the offer from the direction
Tunde needed two decisions, not one.
The first was financial: what would the additional income change during the next twelve months? He wrote down actual obligations rather than treating “more money” as a complete answer. The offer could remove immediate pressure. That mattered.
The second was professional: what work would he repeatedly do until it became the strongest part of his profile?
Job titles rarely answer that question. Calendars do.
Tunde drew two rough weekly schedules. In his current role, most of his time went into research, interaction design, prototyping, and working through implementation details with engineers. In the proposed role, meetings, client updates, planning, and review occupied most of the page.
The exercise exposed the trade. He was being offered more money to practise a different profession.
That did not automatically make the offer bad. A designer who wants to move into delivery leadership might accept it gladly. Tunde’s problem was simpler: he still wanted to become unusually good at product design. The role rewarded him for moving away from that goal before he had chosen to leave it.
Price the option you may lose
On Sunday evening, Tunde added a third column to the page: reversibility.
If he stayed and regretted it, could he pursue another higher-paying role later? Probably, though nothing guaranteed the same offer would return.
If he left the craft for two years and regretted it, could he return at the same level? Possibly. He would need current work, sharper evidence, and a convincing explanation for the gap between his title and his output.
The second reversal carried more friction.
This is where salary comparisons often fail. They count the cash received and leave future options at zero. Yet options have practical value when markets change, contracts end, or a small company runs out of runway. Work that deepens a scarce skill can create several next moves. Work that pays well while weakening that skill may narrow them.
Founders face the same error when a successful demo creates pressure to build before demand is clear. The immediate signal feels decisive, while the next constraint stays hidden. Kojo’s working demo and the invoice that followed shows why the decision after apparent success often matters more than the success itself.
What Tunde sent before Monday
With the deadline close, Tunde did not send a clean acceptance or rejection. He sent a counterproposal.
He asked for the role to preserve a defined share of hands-on product work, named the decisions he wanted to own, and requested a review point after the first few months. He was willing to take on client and delivery responsibility. He was unwilling to let “oversight” quietly consume the craft.
The company could refuse. If it did, he would have his answer: the salary was payment for leaving design, not payment for becoming a stronger designer.
At 8:12 on Monday morning, his folded sheet was beside the keyboard. Two schedules. Three columns. One sentence circled twice: “What will I become better at by doing this every week?”
That is the question to answer before the larger number answers for you.
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