Deciding Your Next Career Move

You love your job. You really do. But it has been 4 years, and you feel like you have achieved everything you can in the company. You asked yourself — how can you grow further. Perhaps, it is time to consider new challenges. It is time to make a career move.

Great. I’m here to help you figure it out. I’ll share what we do at Fave to help our team members to decide.

People = Business

At Fave, the engineering leaders take pride in their relationship with the team. We rarely get a resignation letter out of the blue. When someone decided to graduate from the team, it was a months-long conversation. We explore various options within Fave or provide career guidance on external opportunities. It may seem counterintuitive, but one of our core values is “People = Business”. In fact, when you joined us, we would tell you to use the company as a vehicle for you to grow. And if, at some point, your growth leads you away from us, we are supportive of that.

We, as engineers, are methodical and objective when solving technical problems. But when it comes to our career decision, we are lousy. We are unstructured and rely on our feeling. It is understandable; predicting the future is never easy. We ran project estimation all the time but still got it wrong. It is hard.

And that’s where we make our first mistake — predicting the future. What do you do when you get a new job offer? Most people compare their past in the company with the potential future in the new company. It is natural to do that, but it is also unfair. You are comparing an unknown future versus a known past.

I’ll walk you through one of the decision-making exercises that we do when deciding your next move. As leaders, we would try our best to not be biased during exercise. Our focus is on you.

Roleplaying

Assume you are currently a Software Engineer at company Foo. You just got an offer from company Bar. Bar wants to raise your compensation by 50%, and Bar wants you to lead a new team.

Exciting offer! You really want to sign the offer letter now! But hold your horses. We should break it down to see if this is the best option for you.

First, you need to be clear about the things that are important to you based on your goals, aspirations, motivations, or personal situation. These would be criteria that we will evaluate in our decision-making process. Five or seven is a nice number. More than that, you might fall trap of analysis paralysis.

For example, you may come out with this list:

1. Money. Money is important to me right now because I need to support my siblings.
2. Location. I love working in proximity of other people; hence the office should be closer to my place.
3. Learning. I want to grow my technical skills holistically. I want to be a T-shaped engineer.
4. Role. I love working with people, I would like the opportunity to lead a team.
5. Team. I want to work with a bunch of smart people that I can trust.

Review the criteria if they are aligned with your goals, aspirations, motivations, or personal situation. Can the criteria get you closer to where you want to be? Revise the list until everything is aligned.

Evaluation

To recap, you now working at Foo, and you received an offer from Bar. You can start building the metric to evaluate these decision points:

1. Joining Bar
2. Staying at Foo

However, these decision points won’t help you evaluate fairly. You would have the tendency to compare the past at Foo and the future at Bar.

We can break down “Staying at Foo” into two potential branches. You could stay at Foo, where everything remains a status quo. Or you could stay at Foo with a new role and responsibilities.

Your decision points now would be:

1. Joining Bar
2. Staying at Foo as is
3. Staying at Foo with a new role

Or we could rewrite them to:

1. Potential Future at Bar
2. Potential Future at Foo
3. Status Quo at Foo

“Potential Future at Foo” is a conversation that you should have with your manager. What your career path will look like? Is there an opportunity for you to get the same offered by Bar at Foo?

Now we can map out the decision points and the criteria. We want to consider what is the best outcome and the worst outcome on each decision point. Based on those outcomes, you can fill in the ratings for each criterion.

For the best outcome, you would use a 1 to 5 rating. For the worst outcome, you would use a -1 to -5 rating. Let’s do one example:

Money

This could be a quantitative measure. Let’s assume your annual salary is USD 24000 and your goal is to get to USD 30,000.

Potential Future at Bar:

#1 Best outcome: 50% increment. USD 36,000

#2 Worst outcome: Did not pass the 3-month probation. USD 9,000.

Potential Future at Foo:

#3 Best outcome: Increment to the next salary band of 40%. USD 33600

#4 Worst outcome: Yearly increment of 10%. USD 26,400

Status quo at Foo:

#5 Best outcome: 20% yearly increment. USD 28,800

#6 Worst outcome: No change. USD 24,000

From the outcomes above, you can fill in the ratings. #1 and #3 could be 5 points because it exceeds your goal. #5 could be 4 points, you won’t get to your goal, but it does bring it closer.

#2 could be -5 points, too far away from your goal. #4 could be -1 point; it still brings you closer to your goal. #6 could be -3, no change.

Next, you can sum up the ratings. The total ratings would give you a general idea of your direction. If there are significant total ratings for one decision point, it is clear what you should choose. If not, don’t worry. Now you have a baseline with clear goals, criteria, and assumptions. Gather more information on the assumptions and revise your ratings accordingly.

Talk to your manager and the hiring managers to validate your assumptions. Make plans to achieve them. This table would be helpful in negotiations.

Taking control

You are actively taking control of your future. You do not passively follow along based on the promises made by both companies. No matter the outcome one year from now, you can be content knowing that you have made the best decision.