Kairo
Korean Saju
Patterns before predictions
Two Job Offers: A Saju Framework for Comparing Them
A chart cannot rank two offers, but it can name the pattern most likely to distort your comparison and hand you one fixed set of questions to put to both.
A Saju chart cannot rank two job offers. What it can do is name which of your own patterns is most likely to distort the comparison, and give you one fixed set of questions to put to both offers so that they are judged on the same axes. Kairo reads a chart for the distortion, and leaves the ranking to your evidence about the roles themselves.
Why two offers are harder than one
One offer is a yes-or-no decision. Two offers is a comparison, and comparisons drift toward whichever axis is easiest to measure.
Salary is easiest. So the first draft of most two-offer decisions is a salary comparison with a story attached. But the offers usually differ on at least six axes, and salary is rarely the one that decides how you feel in month nine: scope of the role, the manager you would report to, the pace of the work, how reversible the move is, what you would learn, and how far the role sits from what you are already good at.
A pattern distorts a comparison by making one axis feel like the whole decision. Someone who has changed jobs twice for a manager they liked, and regretted it once, has a manager-weighted pattern. Someone who has taken the higher offer three times and left within eighteen months each time has a salary-weighted one. Your history sits outside the chart. What the chart offers is a vocabulary for guessing which weighting you carry, and your history confirms or rejects the guess.
Ten Gods families as offer questions
The Ten Gods (십성, 十星) sort every character in a chart into five relationships with the Day Master (일간, 日干, ilgan). Those five families translate directly into questions that both offers have to answer.
| Family | Relationship to Day Master | Question to ask both offers |
|---|---|---|
| Power (Pyeongwan/Jeonggwan) | Controls the Day Master | How much structure and supervision does this role carry, and how have you actually behaved under that amount before? |
| Output (Siksin/Sanggwan) | Produced by the Day Master | Does this role have you making things, or managing people who make things? |
| Wealth (Pyeonjae/Jeongjae) | Controlled by the Day Master | Is the money steady (base salary, fixed hours) or variable (commission, equity, options, a bonus tied to targets)? |
| Resource (Pyeonin/Jeongin) | Produces the Day Master | Who in this role teaches you, and what would you know in two years that you do not know now? |
| Companion (Bigyeon/Geopjae) | Same element as Day Master | Who are the peers, and is the relationship with them cooperative or competitive, or are there no peers at all? |
The point of the table is symmetry. Every question gets asked of Offer A and Offer B in the same words. A chart with a prominent Power family is traditionally read as a person for whom structure and authority are a recurring theme. That is a reason to weight the Power row heavily in the comparison. It is no reason to pick the offer with less supervision, or more. Some people with that pattern work best under a demanding manager. Others leave within a year. Your last three managers tell you which you are.
A worked contrast
Take a chart with a Gyeong 庚 Metal Day Master and a Byeong 丙 Fire stem visible in the Month Pillar. Fire controls Metal, so Byeong is Pyeongwan (편관, 偏官), the Power family, in the position traditionally given the most weight for work.
Now two offers. Offer A is a team lead role at a 400-person company with a weekly one-to-one, a written OKR cycle, a 90-day probation and a manager two levels below the CEO. Offer B is the fourth hire at a start-up with no formal reviews and a founder who answers messages at midnight.
The chart says nothing about which company succeeds. It says the Power row deserves the most careful answer. For A, the question is how you have behaved under a formal cadence before: did the structure hold you, or did you spend the year working around it. For B, the question is whether "no supervision" in practice meant freedom, or meant an unpredictable authority with no process to appeal to. Both are Power questions. They have opposite shapes.
The timing question and its limit
Two offers usually arrive with a timing question attached. A ten-year cycle, the daewoon (대운, 大運), and the annual cycle, the sewoon (세운, 歲運), are traditionally read as periods of changed conditions. A daewoon boundary falling in 2027, a Jeong-Mi 丁未 year, is read as a change in what the environment asks of the Day Master, in the same way a chart is read for the conditions of the birth season.
Traditional readers extend that into advice about when to move. Kairo doesn't make event predictions, so a cycle boundary is treated here as a condition to plan around rather than a date to act on. If a daewoon shift in 2027 is read as heavier Wealth emphasis, the useful translation is a question about variable income: would you rather be on a base salary or on commission when your attention is likely to be on money anyway. The answer still comes from your bank balance and your contract.
A scoring page
Copy this, fill it in for both offers, and keep the wording identical for each.
- Base pay, and the share of total compensation that is variable.
- The manager: how many people have reported to them, and how long the last two stayed.
- Scope in writing: what you own on day one, and what you are told you might own later.
- Pace: the expected hours in a normal week and in the worst week of the last quarter.
- What you would be able to do in 24 months that you cannot do today.
- Distance from your current strength: how much of the first six months uses skills you already have.
- Peers: how many people do a job like yours, and whether they are ranked against each other.
- Reversibility: how hard it is to return to your current level of role and pay if this fails at month 12.
- The pattern most likely to bias your answer to items 1–8, named in one sentence.
- What evidence, gathered before the acceptance deadline, would move any score by more than one point.
Item 9 is where the chart belongs. Nothing else on the page needs it.
The reversibility test
Two offers rarely have the same undo cost. Moving cities, taking equity in place of salary, changing industry, or accepting a title above your current level all raise the price of reversing the decision at month 12.
Ask of each offer: if this is wrong, what does the exit look like a year from now. Count the moves it would take to get back to something like your present position. An offer that scores lower on items 1–7 but needs one move to undo can beat an offer that scores higher and needs four. A chart where the Companion family is thin is traditionally read as someone who decides alone; the practical translation is to show the reversibility answers to one other person before the deadline.
What this can and cannot tell you
Saju is an interpretive tradition, not a validated predictive method, and we don't present it as one. A chart cannot see either employer, either manager, either contract or the market for either role. It offers a pattern to test against your experience, and a fixed set of questions that keep two unlike offers on one page. Nothing here is career or financial advice; the compensation, tax, contract and visa questions belong with the people qualified to answer them.