Introduction
A few times in my career, I've been fortunate enough to decide on which job I want most upon receiving multiple job offers.
I made a reusable spreadsheet which you can apply to your own prospective jobs, instructions at the bottom. Here are my personal observations on the pros and cons of two jobs I was evaluating.
They both made offers, so to decide between the two, I tallied them up against the following criteria:
The actual spreadsheet I used for two jobs in particular
| Area of focus | Place 1 | Place 2 | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💰️ Salary | 1 | More than xx% increase with Place 1 | |
| 🏥 Support for volunteering | 1 | Place 1: 3 days paid + XX days unpaid. Place 2 supports flexible hours, so would need to finish off my hours in the evening or weekend | |
| 👥 Culture | 1 | Place 2 is prestigious and has stimulating work | |
| 🏠️ Working from home | 1 | Place 2 said infrequently is ok. Place 1 could be multiple days a week | |
| 🧠️ Side projects | 1 | Place 2 support consulting + working with lots of interesting organisations. Place 1 offer hackdays | |
| 💆 Relaxed atmosphere | 1 | Place 1 is a large department with opportunity to do things in a relaxed manner. Place 2 is a smaller team, so the atmosphere may change during deadlines | |
| 👶️ Maternity/paternity support | 1 | 1 | Both have good support in different ways |
| ⚡️ Interesting projects | 1 | Lots of fascinating projects to work on at Place 2. Place 1 develops prison software + court software which is also interesting. Place 2 is more varied however | |
| 👌 Quality of code | 1 | Judging from respective GitHub projects, Place 1 has an extremely high level of code quality along with tests. Place 2 codebase has some room for improvement | |
| 🍐 Peers | 1 | Place 2 team are a nice group of likeminded people. I don't know much about Place 1 folk | |
| 🌍 Diversity | 1 | Place 2 team is all guys. Place 1 are much more diverse | |
| 📢 OSS + Evangelism | 1 | Place 1 do blogging + OSS by default. Lots of writing to read online, documentation for their projects, retrospectives, interactive demos. Place 2 have some open source code, couldn't find much blogging/written experiences. Both will support my conference speaking | |
| 📈 Career progression | 1 | More opportunity at Place 2. Place 1 seems to only lead onto managerial roles | |
| 📐 Technology architecture | 1 | Place 1 have established tools for CI/Testing/Deployments/Rollbacks/Code Review/Debugging/Development/Collaboration. Place 2 is smaller and appears to have less in place (based on GitHub) | |
| 💤 Lack of politics | 1 | Both have some, but Place 2 better protects you from it | |
| 💻 Technologies | 1 | Place 2 use very interesting + modern tech. Place 1 are starting to use modern tech, but also have some legacy code |
Scores
- Place 1: 9
- Place 2: 8
To use this yourself, you can find the table on GitHub or use this Google Sheet
For more useful tips like this, follow me on twitter.
Update: Sonny raises an interesting point. They suggest adding two points:
- Trust in what is promised
- Possibility of adding the promises in the contract
Which I think are two very important points. Examples:
- Trust in what is promised
- It's entirely possible you're told "yes, we are flexible in allowing you to work from home", however it turns out that when you join, you're actually told "As long as your team says it's ok, it's fine" - but what happens when no one else on your specific team works from home?
- I've also experienced hackdays being a big selling point, but in reality, you are peer pressured into using hackdays to fix bugs and do 'regular' tasks, like those related to technical debt
- Adding the promises in the contract
- Try not to be nervous about asking for them to add certain promises into the contract. In fact, for a previous government job I had (
Place 1), I waited months before formally accepting the offer, all because I insisted they add a clause which guarantees me XX number of days of unpaid leave, so I could continue volunteering at a children's charity and a children's hospital. This meant as bosses and line managers come and go, and they start to question why I'm away so often, I can always refer them to the contract
- Try not to be nervous about asking for them to add certain promises into the contract. In fact, for a previous government job I had (
Conclusion
Hopefully this spreadsheet, or maybe my thought process can give you some tips when deciding for yourself.
Also as a reminder: The actual pros/cons shown above are my personal opinion, and are not representative for the organisations as a whole in question, since I only interviewed with a single team in both cases.
Let me know if you use any other criteria that could be helpful in the spreadsheet.