Deciding between offers

Someone just recently that I worked with was facing a similar kind of decision, whether to stay in their current company where they were making good money and it had provided a lot of stability or whether to move to a startup, which offered a little bit more money, but a lot more instability. And so one of the things that we ended up doing was we had a few conversations and specifically what it boiled down to for them. Everybody makes decisions in a different way. What it boiled down to for them was having clarity about what was important to them.

So we looked at a set of values that was really important to them. What is it that they valued about the work that they did? What is it they valued about their life? What is it they valued in the kind of people that they worked with? We looked at what kind of culture would you thrive in? How do you work best? Who are the kind of people that you want to be surrounded by? What's the kind of energy that you want to have around you that allows you do your best work? What do you want in your leader?

And so we went through some of those kind of questions and that really helped clarify making a really hard decision, which was to leave a position that was quite secure and they were doing really well in. Now a few months into it, it's even better than they could have imagined.

It's a life altering decision, but it's not a life changing decision too much. If you spend six months working in infrastructure and you go ‘This is not for me,’ changing that, it's not like when you have a child where you can't get rid of that child. You're with that child forever, whereas with a job, if you've tried something out and go, ‘Oh, this is not for me,’ that's okay. And if you find the right company as well, you can always dabble in those kind of things.

If you join a company, you join it as a backend engineer. You want to dabble a little bit in front end to see if that's for you or vice versa. That's kind of the choice. What you should be looking for is to find that place which is going to give you those opportunities to grow and to try things out and see what's going to fit for you beforehand.

One thing which guided me from an early stage of my career was gravitating towards people I wanted to be like. I remember I was looking for a job as a software developer in my mid twenties, and I was taking every interview I could get, even if the company didn't look particularly attractive because I saw it as a practice. So if anyone wanted to interview me, I said, "Yes. Okay. When can I show up at your office?"

One day a recruiter called me and suggested I go for an interview at a small internet marketing agency in Camden, which didn't look sexy at all. The only reason I said yes is because I said yes to everything as a policy. I remember going there thinking, ‘I'm only going there to get some interview practice and maybe learn something new.’ And it was half a day of interviewing with five different people.

When I left, I remember leaving with a feeling of, I don't care about what they do. I don't care what internet marketing is. I don't care how it works or what my exact job is going to be, but I want to be like those people, there is something special about those people who interviewed me and they want to be like them and they want to learn from them. Joining that company turned out to be a brilliant decision. I learned so much over the next few years that I stayed with them. I did learn a lot from those people that I met there.

Description: Founder coach and Makers Academy founder Evgeny discusses an early job offer he accepted, despite initial misgivings, because of his admiration for the people who interviewed him for it

There's a lot of, for example, jobs on the market right now, where you can utilise JQuery skills. And the problem is that JQuery is dying and no one will use it in 10 years, probably. And even if it's a well paid job, in the long term it's not going to bring you any benefits. You're going to be stuck with the job. One of my friends is a very good engineer and he basically invested in Ember and nobody uses now. Now everybody uses React or Vue right? So you have to be very careful. I was a lucky one. By coincidence, in one of my companies we decided we're going to go with React, and that was pure luck. We could have gone with Angular, we could have gone with Ember. So for me, it was pure luck, but now I understand that this decision, which technology you going to use for next three years is a very important aspect of your decision.

For sure you are looking for trends. If the major companies use this technology, this technology is not going to die in 2, 3 years. It's worth observing. Another very important factor is if this technology lives well outside the corporations, if the open source community around this technology is rich. If it's rich and there’s a lot of modules, a lot of things happening around it, this is very promising. If it's opposite, we just, we learn from history.

So let's compare Angular and React. They’re both coming from big tech companies, but one is more open, more communal, the other more enclosed and under control of one corporation. People tend to use the simplest one, the open one, rather than the well-maintained corporate version, right? This might be a factor. So community around this, that would probably the main one and also market trends.

I always check who the CTO of the company is, who is going to be my line manager and who I'm going to work with and where those people worked before. What are their achievements. If I can check their KickUp account and see the records, it's always beneficial. This is the first part investigation.

Also financing is very important now, when we have a thousand startups in London, another thousand startups in Dubai, everybody wants to hire an engineer, engineers, not only one, right? So what's, the budget. Budget is very important. Nowadays, engineers, they're very expensive and everybody wants to deliver, but if somebody wants to do it well, it has to basically have budget. And this is also important aspect. If companies are fully funded, who is funding the company, what's the company plan? Also what the perspective for growth?