How do I decide between two good job offers?

Score them against what you actually want over the next two to three years, weighted — not against a generic list of job attributes. Most people stall because they're comparing everything equally when only three or four factors genuinely matter to them. **The structured version:** 1. **List your criteria and weight them out of 100** before looking at the offers. Typical ones: compensation, learning and mentorship, the work itself, manager quality, team, growth path, stability, flexibility, commute, mission. Assign weights honestly — if compensation is 40% of your decision right now because of your circumstances, write 40. 2. **Score each offer 1-10 per criterion.** 3. **Multiply and total.** The number isn't the decision — the value is that it forces you to state your weights explicitly, and it usually surfaces which factor you've been avoiding thinking about. Also notice your reaction to the result: relief or disappointment tells you what you actually wanted, which is genuinely useful data. **The factors that people systematically under-weight:** - **Your direct manager.** The strongest predictor of whether you'll be happy and whether you'll grow. A great manager at a mediocre company beats the reverse. If you can, talk to someone who reports to them. - **What you'll actually do all day.** Not the title or the company — the tasks. Ask for a concrete description of a typical week. - **Who you'll learn from.** Especially early career. Being the most experienced person on a team is a learning risk. - **Trajectory over starting point.** Where does each role lead in three years? **Factors people over-weight**: brand name (matters, less than assumed), a marginal salary difference (10% is recovered in one job change), free food and office perks, and the title itself. **Questions worth asking before deciding**, and both companies will answer them: - 'What happened to the last person in this role?' - 'What would success look like at six months?' - 'Can I speak to someone who'd be my peer?' - 'What's the biggest challenge the team is facing?' **And the gut check that's genuinely informative**: imagine you've accepted offer A. Sit with it for an hour. Then imagine you've accepted B. The relief or dread that shows up is real information — you're not being irrational, you're accessing judgement that hasn't been articulated yet. Use it alongside the analysis, not instead of it. Finally: both are good offers. There's a decent chance either works out well, and the cost of the 'wrong' choice is much lower than the cost of agonising for three weeks.