Hey folks, I'm Swati.
Welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
This newsletter is those conversations: what I'm seeing, thinking, and what I'd tell you if we were grabbing coffee.
This week's edition is about how to pick a job.
But before that:
When you're comparing job offers, what do you look at first?
It's placement season at MU.
Last week a student came to me.
She had two offers:
One from a large corporate paying ₹33 LPA, and the other from an early-stage startup offering ₹28 LPA.
She took the corporate.
When I asked her why, she said: "My next employer will look at my current CTC. This number will help me negotiate."
That logic makes complete sense, but it also doesn’t.
Most people in placement season are optimising for a number.
And for six weeks a year, CTC becomes a proxy for how well you did but your job is to maximise your career trajectory and that’s not restricted to your CTC.
Your first job routes you.
Where you end up in five years depends far more on the skills you built, the problems you owned, and how fast you were stretched than on the number you accepted in month one.
At WhiteHat Jr, I watched people join as sales executives and become Sales VPs in two years.
That trajectory doesn't happen at a large corporate in two years.
There, you spend the first two years learning the process, navigating hierarchy, and proving yourself on a small piece of a large machine.
At an early-stage startup, you might own the entire machine.
The ₹5 LPA gap reduces quickly when someone in a startup is promoted into a role that would have taken five years to reach at a corporate.
It inverts when that startup doesn't compound.
Whether it grows you faster is the only question that remains.
Unfortunately, nobody during the placement season asks about their manager.
Your manager decides what you work on, how much you own, and whether you're stretched or managed.
Two people can join the same company and leave with completely different skills, depending on who they reported to.
The increment rate matters more than the starting number over any five-year window. And it is almost entirely determined by the quality of what you're building and learning.
So here's what I'd actually do.
Find the hiring manager on LinkedIn and look at where the people they've managed have gone.
If the last three people who reported to them moved up or to better companies, that's the trail a good manager leaves.
One question in the interview gets you this directly: "What happened to the last person in this role?"
Search LinkedIn for people who held this exact role at this company two to three years ago and look at their current positions.
If they're in senior roles at strong companies, you're looking at a strong learning environment. And if they're cycling through flat moves, you're looking at a place that extracts without developing.
Glassdoor reviews and industry-specific communities on Reddit tell you more about the culture than you can gauge from an interview.
Finance (PE, investment banking) has a steep early curve. If you move well, role-to-role jumps of 25-40% are normal.
FMCG is steadier but the path to leadership is longer, and tech varies entirely by company stage.
Healthcare is growing fast in India but compensation is regulated differently.
So comparing a ₹33 LPA offer in FMCG with a ₹28 LPA offer at a Series A fintech is comparing two completely different trajectories.
Also do keep in mind how ESOPs could multiply depending on the growth trajectory of early to mid stage companies.
Hit reply: what's a question you wish you'd asked before accepting a job?
I read every email.
Swati
PS: If you know someone who’s deciding between job offers, send this to them. It may help clear some of their apprehensions : )