The sideways step.

Here is a pattern I've watched enough times to stop calling it a coincidence.

A senior person leaves a major, by choice or otherwise. Within about six weeks, an offer appears. Same level, sometimes half a level down. Smaller company, or a bigger one with a narrower remit. The money is close enough to the old money that saying no feels reckless. The person takes it. Eighteen months later they're out again, and the second exit is harder than the first, because now there's a short stint on the CV and a story to explain.

The second-best job always arrives first. That isn't bad luck. It's a function of how the market works.

Why the wrong offer is fast and the right one is slow.

The roles that come to you quickly are the ones where someone already knew your name and had a gap. That's it. It's a matching exercise between their gap and your last job title. Nobody in that process is asking what you're actually good at, what you want to do more of, or which parts of the last role you'd pay to never do again.

The roles that fit properly are slower because they're usually being shaped, not filled. Someone is deciding whether to create a seat. That conversation takes months, and it only reaches you if the market knows what you're for, not just where you worked.

So the fast offer competes with a slow one that doesn't exist yet. And it competes at exactly the moment your ability to judge is at its worst.

The compass problem.

After nineteen years at Sony I could tell you, within a few thousand pounds, what any job inside that building was worth. I could read a room, price a deal, call a promotion three months before it happened. Outside the building, my instrument was useless. I'd been calibrated by one company. Everything I knew about my own value was expressed in a currency only that company printed.

That's what long tenure does. It's not a confidence problem, though it usually shows up as one. It's a measurement problem. You've lost the reference pitch. And you can't fix a measurement problem with encouragement, which is unfortunately what most of the people around you will offer.

Your friends will tell you you're brilliant. Your recruiter will tell you the market is tough right now and here's a role that's very interesting. Your partner will tell you to take the money. All three are being kind. None of them are giving you a read.

What a real read looks like.

Three questions, in order. The order matters more than the questions.

First: what do you actually want. Not the answer you'd give at a dinner party. The unglamorous one. A lot of people who think they want to leave want a different version of where they already are, and blowing up a career because you're, in your own words, a bit annoyed is an expensive way to find that out. I push on this until the answer holds weight.

Second: what do you bring, who needs it right now, and what does it pay. This is the part people skip because it's uncomfortable to run on yourself. Break the job you did into its parts. Which of those parts were genuinely yours, and which only worked because of the logo, the budget and the phone that got answered? Then find out who's paying for the transferable parts today, at what level, in which sectors. Not what you think. What's true. If you don't do this, you will price yourself off the last payslip, which is a number that describes the past.

Third, and only third: is the specific thing in front of you right? Not "is this a good job." Almost every job is a good job for somebody. The question is whether you are the right person in this particular role, given what you just wrote down in the first two answers. Senior people are trained to evaluate opportunities. Almost nobody runs the check on themselves inside the opportunity, and that's the check they wish they'd run.

Run in that order, the fast offer becomes easy to answer. Sometimes the answer is yes, and it's a confident yes rather than a frightened one. More often it turns out to be a decent job that solves this month's anxiety and next year's problem at the same time.

The bit nobody says.

There's a version of the sideways step that isn't about money at all. It's about wanting the diary full again. An empty Tuesday is a genuinely difficult thing to sit inside, and a new job with a new logo makes the discomfort stop immediately. That's a real motive and it deserves to be named rather than dressed up as strategy. Once it's named, you can decide whether it's a good enough reason. Sometimes it is. Usually it isn't.

What I'd do if I were you.

Run the read before the offer arrives, not after. If you're still inside, run it now, while you have income and time and no clock on the decision. The people who work out their market value while they're employed are the ones who leave on their own terms. The people who work it out during a two-week offer window take what's in front of them.

If the offer is already on the table, you can still do this. It takes less time than you'd think, because most of the work is being asked the right question by someone who won't accept a vague answer.

I run that read. Thirty minutes, free, and I'll tell you what I actually see, which is usually more useful than what the people who love you will tell you. You leave with a written summary either way, and you can walk the rest of it alone if you want to.

The right move is worth waiting a few weeks for. The sideways step is worth about eighteen months.