To make a choice, write your cv two years into the future

When I interviewed, I aimed to gain as many offers as I could by a target date. When that day arrived I hit a rough spot. I had laid out my options and mapped my criterias to narrow down my choice. Now, I was down to two offers and I had to make my pick. It was hard, the two offers scored almost equally and I had a hard time choosing between them.

“What will you add to your resume in two years?”

Let's rewind.

I had set out to find a job because I had been laid-off. I hadn’t chosen to go to the market but once that reality had settled, I was going to look for the one offer that gave me the best value that fit my career requirements. Things like salary, of course, but also challenges, future growth opportunities, my future direct supervisor and so on.

Future opportunities were the most difficult to reason about when I had assessed what each offer could give me. It’s really hard to weigh opportunities. They have not occurred yet and they may never come about. Opportunities force out the optimistic in us which can be hard for some people (including yours truly).

“...yes, it will involve some assumptions”

Opportunities are an important aspect of offers because they hold what your future can be and indicate what your future will not be.

• A job as a Senior backend developer may give you an opportunity to work with the latest new framework, or grow into a polyglot developer that can also do some AWS work. It probably won’t expose you to a tool like Figma or let you interact much with UX experts and UI-focused product managers.
• A Cyber-security firm will probably give you opportunities to explore the Darknet and meet some pretty wild AI challenges. It will probably not give you opportunities to work on banking systems and new ways to offer loans.?
• A team-leader position of a small, stable frontend team will probably not give you opportunities to grow into a Director-level manager. OTOH, it may have the opportunity to grow that team into a Frontend-platform group, if that’s where the company is going.?

I had a hard time choosing between two positions that were similar in most aspects. It was hard to gauge which was better. When I’m at an impasse, I consult my wife. She focused me on career value: if you go there (she pointed at one of my options), what will you add to your resume in two years?

My future resume. Huh.

Stop right there, mr. Optimistic T-shirt. Are you actually going to make up your CV? Why not just write “I won the presidency and installed world peace” in there? There’s no room for imagination on a CV!

You’re correct of course. I will employ optimism as a way to flesh out possibilities, not as a way to ignore obstacles. And yes, it will involve some assumptions.

“I guessed the future”

In my mind I put on the cauldron of imagination and lit the stove of excitement. I mixed three ingredients: What other people told me, with Edge, my past experience, and my future ambitions.

• The information I collected when I got my Edge told me what challenges exist. Edge told me what I should expect to focus on when I land at my job and what it is that my team currently does.
• My past experience showed me how difficult or straightforward these challenges should be (or my guess thereof). It showed me what I did best, what I needed to be at my best and what I should be careful of. Experience showed me what I am capable of now.
• Ambition drives us to be greater than we currently are. I let my ambitions guide my aim. Whatever it is I do in my next position, it should be greater than what I had done before.

I put on some loud music and started typing like a were-engineer. I mixed that cauldron, mixed it real hard. There may have been some cackling and strange lights, I’m not sure.

When I was done, I had two new resumes, one for each offer. Each had a new position. Each showed a few achievements I imagined would be within reach after two years of work. The achievements I picked were reasonable (...I think). I did not aim for a superhuman level of achievements but on the other hand I was careful not to aim too low.

I knew that some of the challenges these firms are working on have been around for years. I imagined great brains have given their best at solving those, so I will probably not stroll in and solve them immediately. I looked for issues in behaviors, bad processes and engineering practices, or things I know I had much experience in and could smell their issues from what I learned through Edge.

I had to build on some assumptions. I had to project some items from their current state. For example, a projection that the number of customers will grow over the next two years. In both cases, reasonable projections given the companies’ size and situation at the time. Given those assumptions and projections, I thought about what opportunities will present themselves or be blocked. I planned what I will do in the first 90 days and by extension I could guess what continued success will look like based on that initial trajectory.

I did not presume to know the future. Nor did I think I could realistically predict what will happen in twelve months or even three. This was an intellectual exercise to visualize what, optimistically, could happen. I guessed the future to aid in making a decision. Should you use this method, keep all of this in mind: your analysis may be completely off, your guesses may be wrong.

By fleshing out what the opportunities looked like, I could better see what was the best fit for my goals. I could better imagine where I would be at my best. I could visualize how I will grow.

The achievements I put together were written in past tense. After all, they had already manifested for future me. I tried to clarify the impact I made and what I changed in the world - the way I’d do with an achievement on my up-to-date CV. I did my best to identify the issues and problems each firm presented as their own challenges, and not fall prey to my own biases.

Looking back 18 months, my guesses were not completely wrong. Most of the achievements I wrote down did take place but the impact or value varied (I’ll keep it vague, if you don’t mind). I had other achievements I hadn’t expected. Some things turned out to be harder than I had expected.

This method helped me make a choice. Once I had my achievements written down as if they had already happened, the choice between the two offers became obvious. One firm’s future achievements were focused in one career direction. The other took me down a completely different path.

The possibilities I hoped to get from each offer became apparent and I made my choice.