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You Got an Offer — In Plain English

(Plain-language twin of offer-review-design.md. Same design, no jargon.)

An offer landed. Now you have days, sometimes hours, to make a decision you'll live inside for years — while the part of your brain that does arithmetic is busy being excited and terrified.

WorkWingman helps you think it through. Three questions, honestly: accept, negotiate, or wait?

The most important thing: there is no score

You will not find a number here. No "this offer: 78/100." No "82% chance you'd be happy." No "negotiation success: likely."

That's deliberate, and it's the single biggest design decision in this feature. Here's the reasoning, because it applies to more than job offers.

The moment an app gives you a score, you start optimizing the score. You'd take the offer that scores 81 over the one that scores 79 — even though the number was assembled from guesses, weighted by choices nobody showed you, and the 2-point gap means nothing at all. Worse, any score that blends salary with everything else is quietly deciding how much your kid's school district is worth in dollars. That's not a calculation an app gets to make for you.

So instead of one confident number, you get several honest ones.

What you actually see

A card per thing that matters, each marked Strong / Mixed / Weak / Unknown:

  • Real money — base plus bonus plus a realistically-discounted equity number, adjusted for taxes and cost of living, compared to what you have now. Not the headline figure. The number that lands in your account, in the city you'd live in.
  • Timing — how the deadline stacks against everything else in your pipeline.
  • Dealbreakers — geography, family, visa, notice period, non-compete.
  • Growth — does this move you toward what you said you wanted?
  • Stability — will this job exist in two years?
  • Fit — skills, and what your own interview notes said.

"Unknown" is a real answer, not a blank. If the app doesn't know something, it says so loudly. Missing information quietly counting as "fine" is how you get blindsided.

Dealbreakers are gates, not points

This one deserves its own heading. If something is a dealbreaker — you cannot move, you need the visa, the non-compete is disqualifying — it does not get averaged. No salary is large enough to make the app quietly stop mentioning that the job is in a city you can't move to.

A dealbreaker stops the process. It doesn't lose a weighted comparison.

Scenarios, not a recommendation

Rather than telling you what to do, the app lays out the moves and what each one assumes:

  • Accept now
  • Counter in this range
  • Ask for a few more days
  • Wait on the other thing in your pipeline

Each card is explicit about what it's assuming and what nobody knows. "Accept" is never the big green button. This is your call. The app's job is to make sure you're making it with your eyes open, not to make it for you.

About waiting on that other interview

Everyone wants the same thing here: "what are the odds the other company comes through?"

The honest answer is that WorkWingman doesn't know, and neither does anything else claiming to. Until you've been through a stage roughly fifteen times, your personal history is too small to predict anything — that's arithmetic, not modesty. So you get typical industry ranges, shown as Unlikely / Possible / Likely, captioned "based on typical rates, not your history."

What the app can do usefully is compare timelines. A company that just did your first phone screen is realistically a month from an offer. If the offer in your hand explodes Friday, waiting on that is a bad bet, and the app will say so plainly.

For asking an extension, you get proven templates you can edit — not AI-improvised text with your name on it. Nothing is ever sent for you.

Company stability, not stock tips

You'll see three plain signals — recent layoff news, whether revenue has been rising or falling, and whether the stock is volatile enough that the equity should be discounted — each with a link to the source. Framed exactly one way: company-stability context, not investment advice.

No earnings-call analysis, no price targets, no charts. If you want an analyst, hire an analyst.

The last screen is yours

When you decide, you write down what you chose and why. In your words.

That's the decision journal, and it's the app's favorite screen — because it's the one where the app shuts up. Later, when you're wondering whether you made the right call, past-you left a note about what you actually knew at the time.

Where the app can still fool you

Being straight about the holes we know about:

  • You can go back and re-rank your priorities to justify the job you'd already emotionally chosen. People do this. The app can't stop you and doesn't try.
  • Your interview notes are your gut feelings, not facts. Anything built on them is labeled self-report, because a hunch you typed while excited is not evidence.

What this feature refuses to be

Deliberately not built, and not coming: personality tests, an AI that drafts your negotiation emails, an automatic "accept" recommendation, or any single offer score.

Learn more