Evaluating Job Offers: How to Decide If a Company Is Right for You

Enjoyment

“What if everybody is weird, or I’m stuck in meetings most of the day?”

This is one of those categories that blurs the lines a bit; most aspects of job satisfaction impact your enjoyment in some way. But the company culture and your interest in the day-to-day work often have the biggest impact on your enjoyment in the role.

You no doubt heard a pitch about the company’s culture that spoke to you on some level. Hopefully, you got the sense that the team you’re joining aligned with a culture you enjoy as well. Ideally, you gelled well with future coworkers during interviews.

However, this is one of the harder items to pin down before accepting a job because it’s hard to assess how well you’ll get along with the team from the relatively short interactions you have during interviews.

The work itself is also a huge factor here. Even at a company you love, if you’re working with technologies or products you don’t really like, the daily work can be a grind. Developer life varies greatly depending on the role and company, so you’ll want a very clear picture before accepting a new job.

Another big factor that impacts your job enjoyment is your commute. You’ve likely read about studies that show how detrimental longer commutes are to your quality of life.

Therefore, considering the impact of a long commute is important to your future job enjoyment. You might want to prioritize remote-friendly (or remote-only!) positions or concentrate on locations you can reach easily from your home.

Passion

“Will I be making a positive impact on the world or just grinding away for a paycheck until I retire?”

You spend the majority of your waking hours during the prime of your life working. If you feel like you’re just going through the motions at work, you might start to question if you would be better off doing something more meaningful or exciting. This is a luxury many don’t get to consider, but moving between industries and products is relatively easy for a developer.

If you’re at a point in life where other criteria take a back seat, there is room to explore your passions. For some, working on a product with a meaningful mission is energizing. For others, getting to build new projects from the ground up, or working with the latest frameworks, is what gets them up in the morning. Think about what feeds your passion for development before you accept a new role.

As a bonus, the roles that check this box usually come with coworkers with similar passions. This can make your work even more enjoyable and rewarding.

Compensation

“Should I have held out for more money or found a job with better benefits?”

When considering compensation packages, the most important component is finding a job that fulfills your needs. If you have a mortgage to pay and a family to feed, you need to know where the minimum bar sits.

Once you’ve cleared that bar, you can consider whether you’re being offered a fair market value. Even if it meets your needs, the opportunity cost of taking a job with below-market compensation is hard. A lowball offer might mean the company doesn’t value you or that they’re stretching to afford someone with your skillset. Being underpaid might lead to resentment and an early departure.

If the company can’t really afford you, you’re also more exposed to layoffs and less likely to get sufficient cost of living raises.

A job can impact your earning potential in less direct ways than the salary and benefits. Some might have rules that prevent you from pursuing your side hustle or from building your brand via public speaking or writing. Others might take you off your career path, reducing your future earnings potential.

Aside from your salary, you should also factor in equity, bonuses and benefits. If you are risk-averse, you might prefer a higher salary with lower bonuses and equity. Or you might place a higher emphasis on a generous leave policy or quality health insurance.

Whatever your priorities, be sure to evaluate the whole compensation package, not just the salary.

Creating a Decision Matrix

Now that you’ve identified your criteria, how do you objectively verify how well a job offer matches your preferences? In this section, you’ll explore building a decision matrix to quantify your findings.

A basic decision matrix is a spreadsheet with rows representing different decisions and columns for items that factor into the decision. Typically, you use weights to represent the relative importance of different factors. In this case, the high-level criteria you created in the previous section are your factors. Here’s an example:

The top row represents decision criteria, like those you identified in the prior section. The second row contains weights indicating how important the above items are to your decision. Each criterion gets a 1–10 score representing how well that job matches. The weighted score in this case shows that Dream Job LLC definitely has an edge based on the data. Perfect naming!

To create your own decision matrix, sort your criteria by importance, then translate the result into relative weights. The example uses a 0–1 scale, with a granularity of 0.1, but use what makes sense to you. It’s perfectly fine to have multiple criteria with the same ranking.

Once you’ve settled your list, open your favorite spreadsheet app and enter your criteria and weights.

Use a spreadsheet formula to calculate the weighted score of entered options, multiplying the criteria for each row by the weight. To use the matrix, you then enter a ranking for each job and category combo.

Start by inserting your current or prior job, plus a dream job, to validate and refine your weights using real data. Once you have the criteria and weights ironed out, this spreadsheet will be ready to provide unbiased advice when you have job offers to consider.

It’s important to keep in mind that the matrix is just one way of measuring job fit. You’ll want to take it as one data point, as well as a reminder of your goals and values while you reflect on an offer.