OP didn't take a pay cut. OP's pay was zero.

OP took a job that would provide an income that happened to be 37% less than the one OP had before.

By that argument he could have taken a job at McDonald's flipping burgers and would be better off than 'zero'.

He did take a pay cut. 37% can be felt by anyone earning an income. It's often the decider if you have money left over after living expenses or not.

Let's say you earn 200K. 100k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 100K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 40K a year for retirement. Let's say you earn 37% less. That's 126K. 60k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 66K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 6K a year for retirement. Your savings just dropped by 85%, putting your retirement in danger.

Not saying OP shouldn't have accepted the offer. But let's not pretend this wasn't a significant pay cut.

It was $400k to $250k. Significant, but given the recession, it’s a nice position to be in.

There’s a fella on TikTok named Frank Niu. He made $500k at Netflix, and his job was basically to run around fixing things when they broke. It was a nice reminder that the good times can be very good, and the bad times are worth scaling back one’s expectations appropriately. I doubt he’d still be in the $500k bracket if he were still working, but you never know.

Also, don’t scale your living expenses! It’s tempting, but my current employer almost didn’t make me an offer because they assumed I was living at a $400k lifestyle. In reality we were just paying off our house and driving the same old car.

But you took the offer within one week from being laid off. You don’t feel like you could’ve gotten a better offer if you waited?

I'm not the person you're asking, but the answer seems to be quite obvious (unless you think they're lying about being happy about the situation)— they were making more money than they need by at least 37%.

The last 5-10 years have seen crazy money. I think most of us will see pay cuts sooner or later. Definitely when you get in your 40s+ you're likely to get a pay cut for each new job, unless you're management or architect or similar.

They seem to have their loss-aversion in check.