Post Offer Discussions

After getting an offer, what's a reasonable amount of time that I have to decide whether to accept or reject? What's the upper limit on this reasonableness?

The standard is 1-2 weeks. Anything above 2 weeks is quite generous as it gives you more leverage to get more offers and shop around.

However, a lot of companies will do "exploding" offers which expire in just a few days. These offers tend to be more competitive, but sometimes the company is just being mean.

I imagine the "lifespan" of offers will get shorter the worse the economy is as interview candidates have far less leverage, so maybe I'm wrong on the 1-2 weeks thing.

And how many different (current) members on the team is it reasonable to ask to speak with?

I expect something like this:

• Manager (table stakes) - The engineering manager (EM) is the most important person on the team, so if you aren't allowed to talk to them, that's a red flag.
• Tech lead (nice to have) - After the manager, the tech lead (TL) will have the most influence. If you can talk to them as well, that's great, but I think most companies only let you speak to the EM.
• Anybody else (bonus) - After the manager and tech lead, you'll hit diminishing returns on getting team signal from talking to folks. It's also very, very rare for a company to expose team members on top of the EM and TL.

I recommend these resources about team selection as well:

• [Masterclass] How To Choose A Good Company And Team As A Software Engineer
• "How possible is it to spot red flags about toxic culture during the interview?"

On the topic of reasonable time before you decide on an offer, I just wanted to mention -- you don't need to (you shouldn't) immediately accept the deadlines from the company.

When I was negotiating between 6 offers in 2017, I was transparent about my process and asked for several additional weeks. The Big Tech companies were surprisingly ok with this, so you should just ask. Phrase it something like this:

This is a big decision and I want to ensure I can commit completely to the job I take on. I don't want my employer or me to have buyer's remorse, so I'd like to make the decision with all the data on hand. I'm confident I'll be able to do that within the next 2.5 weeks -- does that timeline work for you?