The Four-Way Stop

Four kinds of job. One intersection. Look both ways.
Survival, adjacent, core, aspirational. Each one is a different bet with a different price. Lay them side by side and see what you're actually choosing between.
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The lowest annual pay that covers your actual bills. Not what you deserve, what you need. Every job gets checked against it.

Add a job to the grid

Pick the column, then fill in what you know. Vague answers make for a useless comparison, so each field asks for something specific. Blank is allowed. "Decent" is not.

Which kind of job is this?
Employer and role, or a nickname you'll recognize. "Warehouse nights at Amazon Shrewsbury" beats "Job 2."
Realistic annual pay, the low end of what they'd actually offer. Then anything that changes the math: benefits, commission, overtime, commute cost.
What it says on the offer letter, and what it will say on your résumé in two years. Is that a step forward, sideways, or down?
Who and what you'd answer for. People, budget, clients, systems. How much of the work is yours versus someone else's?
Where the work happens, and what getting there costs you in time and money each week.
The hours as they really run. Then the question that matters most for a stopgap: would this still leave you time to keep searching?
Pace, culture, the kind of manager you'd likely get, how stable the company looks. What would a normal Tuesday feel like?
What the job actually produces. If you did it well for a year, what could you point to? Revenue, units, tickets closed, projects shipped.
What you bring to this specific job that you can prove. Things you've done, not adjectives about yourself.
Where you'd struggle, or where an interviewer would push. Be honest here. The interviewer will be.
What you'd need but don't have yet: a credential, a tool, a kind of experience. How big is the distance?
How this job sits with everything else: family, health, sleep, money stress, the person you'd like to still be in a year.

The grid

One job per column. If you've entered more than one job in a column, choose which one to compare. The last four rows, marked in red, are where people tend to flatter themselves.

On a phone, the grid scrolls sideways.

Things to consider

Observations drawn from what you entered in the grid above. Not a ranking, not a recommendation. Tensions worth looking at before you commit.

All your jobs

Everything on file, including options not currently in the grid. Click a column heading to sort.

How to read this

The four columns aren't a ladder. A survival job isn't a failure and an aspirational job isn't a destiny. They're different bets with different costs, and most people in a hard search are placing more than one at a time whether they admit it or not.

The tool only knows what you tell it. It can't check the pay against the market, can't tell whether your strengths would survive an interview, and has no idea whether the company you're eyeing is about to cut half its staff. Everything in "things to consider" is a pattern in your own entries, nothing more.

Read across the rows, not just down the columns. The interesting findings are usually sideways: the survival job that eats the time you need for the core search, or the adjacent job that pays nearly as much as the core with half the gaps.

If the Gaps row is doing the heavy lifting, the next step is to take a real posting and work out exactly what has to be closed. If the Key Deliverables row is thin, you have a proof problem, not a targeting problem. Both are covered in Get Hired in a Broken Job Market and its companion tools.