Four Percent

For the required form field, most people put 0 or the target number rather than the current one, and nobody has ever queried it in my experience. The field exists because someone bought a recruiting system in 2014, not because a human is auditing it.

Practical bit: get it in writing before you withdraw from the other offer, and not "in writing" as in a Slack message from your manager. Amended contract or a formal letter from HR with the effective date and the new title. I've seen a verbal counteroffer become "at the next review cycle" once the outside offer was gone.

Meanwhile, use the time rather than stewing in it. Ship one thing nobody asked for that obviously helps — a dashboard people keep asking for manually, documentation of the thing everyone is scared to touch. Empty calendars are the only time you get to do that, and it's also how you become the obvious owner.

Three months is roughly the trough for most people. The honeymoon burns off around week six, you're competent enough that nothing is novel, and you're not yet trusted enough to do anything interesting. It's the least rewarding stretch of the whole arc.

What usually breaks it is your first piece of real ownership, which for most people lands somewhere between month four and month seven. If you're at month nine and still flat, that's worth taking seriously. At month three it's just the shape of starting a job.

The other thing: a job you don't dread is not a failure. A lot of us came out of bad workplaces expecting the opposite of misery to be joy, and mostly the opposite of misery is quiet.

Ask both places one question: who was the last person promoted into the role you want, and how long did it take. The big company will have a documented answer and a queue. The startup will either have a real answer or an uncomfortable pause, and the pause is itself the answer.