If you read my post about my experience at GHC ’22, you’ll know I was fortunate to walk away from GHC with four job offers. While I was grateful and ecstatic to have that many offers, I had a very challenging decision to make. This was my first role as a software engineer in a hopefully long, fruitful career. I knew that my first role was important for setting up a solid foundation in software engineering. I’m a notoriously indecisive person but knowing I was at a crossroads in my life and that my decision would affect the trajectory of the rest of my career heightened my anxiety and indecisiveness.
The decision was challenging because there was no offer that I could immediately write off. I discontinued any interview process that was an obvious “no” for me so all offers were solid contenders. There wasn’t an offer that immediately stood out to me either; each had its advantages and disadvantages. I endlessly vacillated between these advantages and disadvantages in my head. This proved to be a futile exercise.
I looked up more concrete, objective ways to decide between job offers and I stumbled upon this article: https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-scorecard-to-help-you-compare-two-jobs. The author explained the scoreboard she created to “help [her] clients take an objective look at decidedly subjective considerations.”
The author outlines all the factors that are important to her in making a decision and then she weighs how important that factor is by giving it an “importance weight” rating from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates low importance and 5 indicates high importance. Then, she creates a column for each offer she is considering. For each offer, she assesses how highly the offer scores on each factor.
For example, suppose one of your factors is salary and this is a very important factor to you, so you rate it a 5. If one company is offering you a salary lower than the market rate, you might rate the salary a 2. Since 5 x 2 = 10, that offer’s score for that factor is 10.
After scoring each offer on each factor, you end up with an objective, numerical assessment of each offer.
When I completed the exercise of mapping out the offers and how they fared by factor, the results were surprising. Prior to using this framework, I felt that Offer 1 and Offer 2 were neck and neck. When I completed the scoreboard, it became crystal clear to me that Offer 2 was the superior offer. The score difference was stark. Offer 3 was also the offer that I was considering the least, but I was surprised that it was so close to Offer 1. I was leaning toward Offer 4 the most so it was great to see the data support my inclination.
The objectivity makes you feel more confident in your decision. Without this framework, I would have likely started my position at Company 4 and endlessly wondered, “what if?” What if I had chosen Offer 2 instead? Maybe Offer 1 was the best choice after all…
I’m less likely to fall victim to the “grass is greener” syndrome because I know that I made the best decision for myself given the information I had. Unfortunately, I can’t peer into the future so it’s impossible to assess which offer is the “perfect” option. But I recall feeling a sense of relief when I calculated the sums and identified a winner. There is no point in torturing myself and continuing to ponder the decision. It’s hard to argue with the numbers.
