So I should clarify my "interesting work" description and mention that I meant more so that it would be a place where I gain tons of experience compared to the 100% telecommute position. I interviewed today actually and it went well, except the last guy I interviewed with (a director) completely drilled me and made me look foolish for a couple line items I put on my resume :( Overall I felt the interviews were mostly positive though... it was a 4hr long interview so I'm shot. As far as the company though, they are fast-paced and doing a lot of cutting edge stuff with technology, and it really does seem like I'd have several mentors there who I could learn quite a bit from. Work culture seems great and asking my old coworker about remote work, he said the manager I'd be working under (who he's also under) is pretty good about allowing work from home but you have to notify them and you can't be abusing it too much and "working from home" 3 times a week and letting the manager know the morning of. Apparently there were some that were doing this and it resulted in them being a little more stringent about the policy. It actually doesn't seem that bad compared to where I'm working at now in terms of them being flexible to WFH.
The commute would be extended out by 10-20 minutes for me depending on traffic and over twice the mileage (from 8mi round trip to about 22mi round trip). Right now my commute ranges from 15-30 minutes or so which is pretty good.
The other thing about this position, which is why I think it would probably pay less, is that it's more an entry-to-mid level position for the field I'd be getting back into more of (security). Right now I'm in a senior QA position and if I went with the large financial institution (which I think would pay more and has better benefits plus telecommute), I'd sorta 'maintain' that higher level status... of course, at the expensive of not really being able to capitalize on growing my security skill set. It's weird though because the position there is as a infosec engineer but it really is just a QA engineer for their security-centric applications, which is similar to what I do now... I wanted to get more back into the overall security engineering picture and especially more into pentesting.
Granted, all this is hypothetical still. I just interviewed with the large financial institution last week and with the smaller division of a tech company today, so I don't think I'd hear back from either place in less than a week or two. I actually have one more place I've been waiting for a reply back from - this would be more in a security generalist role but at probably a senior level... I interviewed almost a month ago and haven't heard back but I understand they're pretty busy with things there (brand new IT/dev group and they've hit the ground running). Sounds like this third place is super-busy and somewhat demanding of time. They are the same commute as my current job and when I put my asking salary out they seemed to be shocked I would ask for so much lol.