Contract to Hire...Hire offer is $70k less
I work in cybersecurity. I've been working for the past over a year as a contractor, but the contract said that there was an expectation to hire as FTE. I built them out an entire code pipeline that automates a very complex custom process saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars and condensed their workload by 75%. End of the contract is coming up and the boss says they are going to open those positions but wants to put the jobs out their to the rest of the market to see who else they can get because they want to pay 70k dollars less in salary instead of hiring us and paying us what would be equivalent pay that we make now. The problem is they are stupid and don't have a proper code repository so everything lives on my local machine. If I go...so does the entire process that I had built.
Would you stay and take $70k less pay and leave the second you got a better offer or would you say no thank you and walk away having no job but knowing that the process that was built for them won't exist anymore and they would fuck themselves. Even if someone else were to build the entire thing again from scratch it would probably take someone 12-18 months to rebuild...even with AI.