Recruiter here, almost 20 years. Do a search for articles warning about counteroffers and you'll find almost all are written by agency recruiters. Why is that?
It's because agency recruiters lose probably millions in fees every year when candidates accept a counter. I have personally lost 30K on a single fee due to counteroffer on more than one occasion. It hurts quite a bit - that's a car - which is why if you accept a counter you'll get calls and emails from the recruiter saying it's "career suicide" (it isn't) and that you're making a huge mistake.
Then they quote these stats. I've heard things like "90% of people who accept counters leave the company in 6 months", and they might add "whether fired or through resignation" just to throw some fear into the candidate. These stats are pretty hard to find, and they should be, because companies don't report counteroffers to some agency. They happen in the dark. It's only surveys, and usually conducted by recruiting firms who have a vested interest in the results.
Some counteroffers are a mistake, but the people who scream not to accept coineroffers the loudest are the ones with the most to lose.
My recruiter practically broke down in tears when I accepted a counteroffer in 2013. Counteroffers can be great tools to increase your salary, whether you accept or reject them. In my case it was purely about money. I was making $117k and I wanted a raise, but the company only wanted to give options. If it were an early stage Google or Uber, I'd go for it, but not this company. I wanted cash.
They played the old "not in the budget, lets revisit in 6 months game" but my ace in the hole was an unsecured network share drive where I found an offer letter for a coworker showing he made $135k. I was genuinely ready to leave so I contacted my recruiter (who had placed me at 2 consecutive companies) and she got me an interview at CAA (the Hollywood talent agency) as a node.js dev. They beat my salary with an offer of $125k, plus some perks like 2 week company shutdown around the holidays, half day before every gov't holiday, generous bonuses and 401k match. The downsides were a commute to Century City, and having to wear a suit everyday.
I went back to my employer and handed in my resignation and told them about the offer. They came back (unsolicited) with a counteroffer of $140k and an extra week of vacation. I took it and told my recruiter. She told me horror stories about people who take counteroffers who get fired or quit within months and how I would never work in this town again, etc.
I stayed at the company for 2 more years and was promoted to director of engineering, and got raises to $155k and then $175k before resigning to work freelance. On my way out the company was begging me to stay and I could only imagine what they'd offer if I chose to entertain them.
I took a counter once. When you're miserable at a place, for whatever reason, a big pay raise will make you forget it for about 4 months, then you'll be miserable again. Life is too short to be miserable 8+ hours a day.
> Back to my candidate. Two days after he took the counter-offer, I received a call from one of his colleagues. She said word on the street was that one of her co-workers had recently accepted a counter-offer with her employer, and she wanted me to know she would never do that. If I represented her, once she gave a commitment, she would stick to it. Not only that, but she also said only a weak-minded person would do something like that (accept a counter-offer) and she had lost all respect for this person.
Can you imagine an actual human being calling up a recruiter completely unprompted to inform them that counteroffer-accepters are weak-minded jerks and no one likes them? It's like one of those ads where a bunch of guys suddenly interrupt their game of ultimate frisbee or whatever to discuss how great their car insurance company is.
Career suicide for a software engineer? Unless you murdered someone and you're in prison for life, I don't see how that's possible in today's market.
Back when I worked at a bank, counter offers were the standard way of getting a raise. If you had a competing offer, the Bank would almost always match that. Meanwhile, raises were maybe 1% a year. (I remember that Illinois raised state income tax at about the same time I got a raise. I had less take-home pay after both of those took effect than before. Raises didn't even keep up with the tax burden, much less the cost of living. Not that they necessarily should, but they also didn't keep up with my career growth, which is a better benchmark.)
Thank you for the honest assessment; I had not previously been fully aware of the incentives on recruiters or the source of their statements.
That said, early in my career as an employee, prior to reading any advice by recruiters, I made a decision to not accept counter-offers as a general rule. My main reasons are the ones people usually cite: a) if I am dissatisfied enough with my job that I applied for other jobs, it is almost certainly not (just) about the money, and b) my relationship with both employers becoming strained.
So far it has worked out for me, and I don't plan on changing that, but I'll be sure to keep this in mind in the future.
I got the same a number of years ago when I went through a difficult recruitment process to get a job, and got the offer and in the end turned it down because after extended consideration that it just wasn't the right job for me even though it was a good job with a significant pay increase. It was using technologies I didn't specially want to work on, for a company that didn't really interest me, and who hadn't persuaded me that they were doing anything I'd be interested in. Nothing wrong with the job, or the offer, it just wasn't the right place for me.
I recruiter was not happy and basically told me that I wouldn't get anything else, and if I got a reputation for turning down jobs I couldn't expect agencies to ever put me forward for anything else. They just screamed at me on the phone.
I did get another job and it was far better (for me) than the one I turned down.
When I started working, most of the veterans I worked with offered the same advice about never accepting counters. I now offer that same advice to junior folks. I don't think you have to be a recruiter to recognize there is a problem.
I have a related story about job offers. I had a job offer fresh out of University, for about half of what the standard salary was at the time.
After some thinking (2min... NO), and letting them stew for a few days, I told them "No". They asked if it was because of the salary. "Yes, yes, it is". They immediately doubled their offer.
Sorry, but the answer is still "No." If the first contact you have with me is that you try to screw me and assume I'm stupid, I will not work for you. I'd be better off unemployed.
I found another job 2 weeks later, for more than their second offer. And those people didn't play games.
This couldn't have come at a better time, as I just navigated this last week. I kind of disagree with most of what the author is saying. Here's why.
The author posits that you've begun looking for a new job for a reason. There are things that you dislike about your job. That's logical, and it's the number one reason that I went on a search of my own.
The problem is that there's always some level of information asymmetry. You know everything you dislike about your current job; you can't know what you'll dislike about your new job until you begin that role.
However, once I was given another "great offer", it made me realize that part of every job is disliking certain aspects of it. No matter where you are, it's impossible to find a role that you like 100% of the time.
When I received another job offer, it made me realize that there were a lot of things that I was taking for granted about my current job. And when I notified my current employer that I was leaving, they reminded me of how valued I was with the package that they put together. In fairness, they could've done a better job with this throughout my employment.
At the end of the day, the compensation and future commitments (all of which are in writing) made it compelling to me to stay and not risk disliking my next role.
Have you ever heard the saying that you should flip a coin to make important decisions, because as soon as the coin is in the air you'll know what you want anyway? Well, I went through the coin flip process and realized I had taken a lot of things for granted at my current employer. And that's why I stayed.
> And when I notified my current employer that I was leaving, they reminded me of how valued I was with the package that they put together.
Yea, you were so valued that they DIDN'T offer it to you until you threatened to leave. That doesn't sound like an employer that values you, it sounds like an employer who got away with a great bargain while it lasted.
I agree that saying counter-offers are universally bad is too simplistic.
Sometimes your compensation simply has fallen behind market without you or your employer realizing it. Especially at a smaller company, your manager might very well not have firm sense of what your market compensation would be. A competing offer is a great way for both you and them to get your compensation up to market.
Just because you interviewed for another job does not imply you're unhappy with your current one. I try to occasionally interview just to keep a tab on the market, even when I'm entirely happy with my current job (including its compensation). In fact, the results of such interviews are often that my current job is better than anything else out there.
I completely agree. I went through this at my first job 13 years ago. I was hugely underpaid. I'd gotten the highest rating and highest raise each year for two years, but still made barely more than new grads coming in as the job market had improved.
I did a job search, found 10 jobs I was overqualified for that were offering 60% more money, and took the list to my manager as part of my argument for a raise. For six months he delayed, said he was looking in to it etc, but in the end said there was nothing he could do, he had no flexibility.
I found a different company that I liked, accepted their offer at about 60% higher salary and told my manager I was leaving in two weeks. Within 24 hours they had matched the other salary, and thrown in some stock too.
They could clearly have done this at any time in the past six months, when I was pressing my manager on it every single week.
Of course I left. If you are worth the money, you should be paid the money, and not have to beg for it. I was at the next company for a very enjoyable four years, and even got promotions and raises without having to lobby for them and explain my impact.
> They could clearly have done this at any time in the past six months, when I was pressing my manager on it every single week.
They had no incentive to.
I was recently in the same situation - doubled my salary after years at another place.
Until you bring proof positive that you could bring in more elsewhere there's no reason for them, there's no reason for them to take your word for it that the market would pay you more.
Companies often rely on the sunk cost of employees laziness/sunk cost.
Depending on the company, if companies gave out raises whenever anyone asked, they'd be broke pretty soon (this applies more to a company like Walmart that relies on a lot of low-paid workers compared to Bell Labs).
> I was at the next company for a very enjoyable four years, and even got promotions and raises without having to lobby for them and explain my impact.
It's likely that you started working a lot harder at the second place. I know I did.
The "never" bit seems like bad advice. Terrible advice, honestly.
I've worked happily at one of the "big" tech companies. Without going too much into details, I ended up getting a really big offer from another one of the big guys (i.e., in the seven figure range over 4 years, obviously with the bulk of it being equity).
I was really torn. I was happy at my job, but that's a large enough of money to make a material difference in the lives of my loved ones. And like a lot of people here, I value the happiness of my family over my own.
I didn't expect my existing employer to do much. So I gave my boss an early heads up this was happening, partly because I thought there was a small chance there would, but mostly so I would leave on good terms.
Again, long story short, they not only matched the offer but came over the top of it. I went home to think about, talked about it with my wife & decided the next day to accept the counteroffer.
That was a few years ago. I've honestly been happy since then. I don't feel this was ever held over my head or held against me. (To the contrary, I was recently promoted.)
When it comes to counteroffers, a lot of it comes down to two things: 1) why you were looking in the first place, and 2) how you handle things with your existing employer.
Regarding (1) - if you were unhappy, money isn't going to fix that. Staying just because of money is dubious at best.
Regarding (2) - the main thing is don't be an asshole. Nobody is going to hold you advocating for your own best interests. Senior execs know the game. They would do the same thing in your place (if they haven't already). If you're an asshole, well, nobody wants to keep an asshole in the first place. But if you're pragmatic & even–keeled, you don't damage the relationships (even if you stay or go).
I'm not a recruiter (anymore?) and I will say that I think the advice in this post is pretty important. I've had two bad experiences with being tainted after accepting a counter, and the logic behind why that happens is extremely straightforward.
Clearly, there's a lot of dramatic license built into the word "never" in the title (a less baity title would be "Be wary of counter-offers"). Clearly, there are employers that will make counters in good faith hoping to retain you for the long haul. But business is business, and many employers, even very good ones, aren't going to make irrational decisions just to be nice.
I think it's important to differentiate what type of counter it is and whether or not it solves the problem reasonably. A counter can be a pay raise, new role/promotion, or even something like letting someone telecommute. Those are all very different scenarios, and the stereotypical "walks into managers office with shiny offer from competitor demanding more" may have less positive long-term results than the more common less aggressive approach.
"Let’s take an example and say that some Problem A has triggered a need of change. As you are a good employee you have tried already to solve the problem (e.g. you asked for more money or you tried to change the process), you failed. Now, all of a sudden Problem A gets solved in just some 10 minutes. Why wasn’t it solved before? How long will it take until this kind of a Problem B will appear? When Problem B comes, it’s going to hit harder. Things won’t change."
This paragraph bugs me. It's as if the author assumes the workplace to be swarmed with malicious agents, and you, some ambitious, innocent and pure-hearted employee.
Why wasn't it solved before? Because it was cheaper to leave it unsolved.
Suddenly, you introduce a significant cost to leaving the problem (your leaving the company), and so it gets resolved.
And whaddyaknow, it'll happen at any other company too because its pretty damn effective way to operate a business.
> employees who accepted a counter-offer are leaving the company after an average of 15 months.
15 months MORE. Damn. I wish I could stay that long in a single company.
Either the project is long finished, or the startup went bankrupt, or the entire department is redone, or there is somewhere else offering a significant raise, or...
Sometimes, I wonder what's the average tenancy for competent employees in a hot tech hub.
As of a few years back, the tenure of software developers when leaving a job averaged at 18 months. I'd guess that silicon valley drags that average down, and the rest of the industry drags it up.
I'd like to suggest a rule of thumb from the employer's/manager's side that I was given by a mentor once (and I've seen the consequences anecdotally both when I followed it and when I didn't);
Just like the article suggests not to accept a counter offer I'd say don't ever GIVE a counter offer (or try to keep the employee resigning).
Of course always treat your people well and try your best to resolve issues and keep on top of their aspirations and desires but when they've already made up their mind to resign and they actually resign rarely (in my limited experience) can anything good come from you persuading them to stay because:
A) they'll likely leave anyway within 1-1.5 years
B) they might never actually have left and they're using very poor/immoral negotiation tactics
C) it sends a horrible sign to the other employees saying they (only) get ahead if they threaten to resign
And you have to be pretty fil with whatever your convictions are here I believe. So in my view the article is right - never accept a counter offer (I did once and while it was a bit promotion it was a huge mistake) but also never give one!
I don't know what triggered the author to write this, possibly a personal experience.
But whatever it was, he seems convinced that he has seen the light, and even distilled the message to "Never accept a counter-offer", which is nothing but a loud, attention grabbing, media-optimized title, but also, ultimately too-general-to-be-useful type of advice.
The text itself is lacking useful information, maybe with the exceptions of the link to the surveys.
As I get older I observe how smart people tend to put in a large amount of work before they feel ready to disseminate their carefully created, validated, humble in scope, and very often valuable message.
I once was moving out of the city where I was employed, so naturally looked for opportunities where I was moving. The city I was moving to was larger and had nearly 50% higher salaries.
When my boss realized I was moving, he offered me to work remotely. I said I had already accepted the new offer, and left. Boss said I was always welcome back if I changed my mind (The idea of a big raise never came up at this point). A year later, the old boss contacted me and offered me to work remotely, and matched the salary of the bigger city I was living in, so I signed back to the old company with a deal that was likely better than what I could have gotten had accepted to stay initially.
Bottom line is:
- Keep good relations with employers where you like working:
- A good way of getting a raise might sometimes be leaving and then returning.
I accepted a counteroffer once and it ended up being a huge mistake. The company was struggling and they felt they couldn't lose me etc, it was near the end of the year and everyone was already upset because it was announced that we wouldn't receive end of year/xmas bonus'. After I accepted the counter-offer I was at a lunch xmas party for our team (around 15 of us) and one person said to 'thank god this isn't a going away lunch for rick (me).', to which everyone was like 'you were going to leave???'. I was the tech lead so this news hit the other devs hard... at some point i was chatting with a few different employees (non-devs) and they said to me 'so you had to go get another job to force them to give you a raise, good move', to which I just smiled and didn't know what to say back and finally threw out 'I suppose so'.
The next work day - monday 12/24 - I'm working from home and I get a call from HR; they fired me over the phone on xmas-eve, apparently the 3 employees I had the late conversation with went to HR and claimed I was bragging about the raise and that the only way to get a raise at the company was to get another job and threaten to leave. No amount of explaining that's not happened would appease them, and as they put it they had '3 peoples word against just you'.
I would say that before you consider all offers, you should be aware of your circumstances. Are you integral to your current company? Do you have an open relationship about your career with your current employer? Do you like your current job? Are the benefits something you think about regularly (4 weeks leave time, work from home, fully covered health insurance)?, having researched pay for your level of experience, where are you? (knowing this is critical). If you're on the low end, ask your employer why. If you do get offered a new position, is "total compensation" better (salary - taxes, medical, dental, leave time, additional benefits)? If offered a bonus, remember you have to pay taxes on it.
I tend to agree with the rule "don't entertain counter offers", but if you think you may get one, discuss it directly. A lot of employers will be very honest about your total comp and why they level you there. It's often about their own costs, their own "grid" of salaries, and because they have a "system", they can't really pay you more unless you're promoted to management. It could be about you and if that's the case, they probably view you as expendable and you should almost certainly move on.
Whatever you do, try to minimize the emotions and focus on all of the tangible aspects.
The money is a symptom. Even if your current employer counteroffers, the fact that you got them to cough up the extra dough doesn't change the fact that they didn't value you enough to retain you with it in the first place.
If money/title/growth/etc. are important, and you've made it clear to your manager sufficiently, and they still don't act: go. The counteroffer won't change the underlying dynamic, and its other symptoms will continue to manifest.
It's not that they didn't value you, it's that you made an agreement to sell your services at a given price. If you no longer like the agreement let them know. Anyone worth working for won't have hard feelings that you've decided you're worth more.
Labor is part of a market where people get to decide how much their labor is worth. Take full advantage of that, as employers certainly will.
Do you want to keep working in a place where the only way to get a substantial raise is to threaten to quit? Accepting a counter-offer basically encourages this bad behavior on the part of companies, and I would not accept one on principle. When you get a counter-offer, whatever they say, you should be hearing "Ahh, we got away with paying you this little for so long--now I suppose we have to pay you market rate."
What it's more of is that your rate of pay-raise doesn't actually match the market-rate. You were hired presumably at market rate, and your pay has presumably gone up/down based on a percentage of that initial rate. Especially if the market is volatile, there'll eventually be a significant discrepancy.
And now you have some new company who is paying the market rate, in other words, evaluating your position against the total market. Your company, which was at best evaluating your position within their own corporation, is now forced to do a market-scale re-evaluation. With the poaching offer as the baseline, since you've been tagged by someone as being worth that much (and willing to pay it).
And now you've got a big boost in pay. Not because your C_Os were gathering together in the dark halls of the Bedlam basements, black robed, circled around the Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh Liber Razielis Archangeli, poring over your employee review, whispering amongst themselves "yes, yes, he's a quiet man; he won't complain and he won't tire; give him a penny more and he won't trouble another year; the fucking fool".
All it is is that there was never a reason to do more work than necessary. And no reason to pay more than necessary.
On the other side of this, I accepted a counter-offer and enjoyed another four or so years at the company, finally leaving after being there almost eight years.
Counteroffers are poison for both the employee and the company.
The employee now knows that he could have gotten the same thing the employer is now offering before the counteroffer.
The employer knows that the employee is spending a non-trivial amount of time to interview and talk to other employers.
I agree there should be no trust here, but we are conditioned to think that there should be.
Exceptions aside (and you don't know if you're in one of those exceptions), a counter offer allows you to exist in a poisoned relationship for a few more months.
> The employee now knows that he could have gotten the same thing the employer is now offering before the counteroffer.
This only matters if the employee was under the delusion that the company had the employee's best interests in mind. This is true at very few companies. If your company speaks of itself as if it's "a family", it's likely that this is just an attempt to create employee loyalty that they can leverage into lower salaries.
> The employer knows that the employee is spending a non-trivial amount of time to interview and talk to other employers.
This only matters if the employer is under the delusion that their employees are in it for anything other than money. It would be extraordinarily difficult to prop up this delusion in the tech industry where staying at companies more than two years is unusual, so I can't imagine many employers care.
> I agree there should be no trust here, but we are conditioned to think that there should be.
If you agree there should be no trust here, why are you making an argument based on trust?
Just because people are conditioned to think something which allows them to be exploited doesn't mean they should stick to the exploitable thinking in the rare case where it ceases to be exploitable.
Some times office policies prohibit giving employees good raises and precipitate an environment where a counter offer is necessary to get a good pay bump. The act of the employee looking elsewhere usually removes those internal handcuffs.
Its not always about shafting an individual so much as managing the entire business.
This can also be wholly subjective to the company, culture, boss, and employee.
My father once received a pre-emptive counteroffer.
Basically, he did his job well and took on steadily increasing responsibilities as the company expanded rapidly, and in five years he went from a minor role in a small business to a critical role in a large business. One day his bosses suddenly realized that their senior system administrator was working for peanuts and any of their competitors would love to have him.
They gave him a 50% raise on the spot. He hadn't even been thinking about other work.
There are always exceptions, even more, there are cases when accepting a counter-offer is a right decision (your cat dies and you need bunch of money to save her).
I've had a counter-offer at each of the jobs I've resigned from. Neither got much beyond the stage of "Would you stay for more money?". The first, I gave my employer the courtesy of saying I would think on it overnight, although my mind was already up (but you never know). The second I judged not as serious an offer. Neither time I left was it about the money, anyway.
It did make me curious. I think an alternative way to read it (as opposed to the "why didn't I get this sooner?" attitude from the article) is "why didn't I ask for a pay-rise sooner?". This has made me more confident in dealing with employers; I'm about to ask my current one for a rise and I think I'll get it.
It's quite nice to leave it open-ended, too. If an employer dangles the promise of 'more money' in front of you, but you don't actually go into details, you can always fantasise that it was going to be twice as big as it actually was. That way, you'll probably aim higher in future than if you'd found out the full details.
Got called into SVP' office. "Oh Crap," I thought. Marched into secure Exec area.
SVP:Is Joe Blow good?
Me: yes. Critical
SVP: why?
Me: runs acqusition system. Only one that knows it. Smart too
SVP: thanks.
--
I left with my escort and called my boss. "What was that about?" said Joe quit and his salary request to stay needed Executive approval. So SVP asked to talk to someone who directs his work (me).
[+] [-] fecak|9 years ago|reply
It's because agency recruiters lose probably millions in fees every year when candidates accept a counter. I have personally lost 30K on a single fee due to counteroffer on more than one occasion. It hurts quite a bit - that's a car - which is why if you accept a counter you'll get calls and emails from the recruiter saying it's "career suicide" (it isn't) and that you're making a huge mistake.
Then they quote these stats. I've heard things like "90% of people who accept counters leave the company in 6 months", and they might add "whether fired or through resignation" just to throw some fear into the candidate. These stats are pretty hard to find, and they should be, because companies don't report counteroffers to some agency. They happen in the dark. It's only surveys, and usually conducted by recruiting firms who have a vested interest in the results.
Some counteroffers are a mistake, but the people who scream not to accept coineroffers the loudest are the ones with the most to lose.
I've written about counteroffers as well, but didn't take the typical recruiter path (https://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2014/02/19/counteroffers/).
[+] [-] byoung2|9 years ago|reply
They played the old "not in the budget, lets revisit in 6 months game" but my ace in the hole was an unsecured network share drive where I found an offer letter for a coworker showing he made $135k. I was genuinely ready to leave so I contacted my recruiter (who had placed me at 2 consecutive companies) and she got me an interview at CAA (the Hollywood talent agency) as a node.js dev. They beat my salary with an offer of $125k, plus some perks like 2 week company shutdown around the holidays, half day before every gov't holiday, generous bonuses and 401k match. The downsides were a commute to Century City, and having to wear a suit everyday.
I went back to my employer and handed in my resignation and told them about the offer. They came back (unsolicited) with a counteroffer of $140k and an extra week of vacation. I took it and told my recruiter. She told me horror stories about people who take counteroffers who get fired or quit within months and how I would never work in this town again, etc.
I stayed at the company for 2 more years and was promoted to director of engineering, and got raises to $155k and then $175k before resigning to work freelance. On my way out the company was begging me to stay and I could only imagine what they'd offer if I chose to entertain them.
[+] [-] Clubber|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|9 years ago|reply
> Back to my candidate. Two days after he took the counter-offer, I received a call from one of his colleagues. She said word on the street was that one of her co-workers had recently accepted a counter-offer with her employer, and she wanted me to know she would never do that. If I represented her, once she gave a commitment, she would stick to it. Not only that, but she also said only a weak-minded person would do something like that (accept a counter-offer) and she had lost all respect for this person.
Can you imagine an actual human being calling up a recruiter completely unprompted to inform them that counteroffer-accepters are weak-minded jerks and no one likes them? It's like one of those ads where a bunch of guys suddenly interrupt their game of ultimate frisbee or whatever to discuss how great their car insurance company is.
[+] [-] jrockway|9 years ago|reply
Back when I worked at a bank, counter offers were the standard way of getting a raise. If you had a competing offer, the Bank would almost always match that. Meanwhile, raises were maybe 1% a year. (I remember that Illinois raised state income tax at about the same time I got a raise. I had less take-home pay after both of those took effect than before. Raises didn't even keep up with the tax burden, much less the cost of living. Not that they necessarily should, but they also didn't keep up with my career growth, which is a better benchmark.)
[+] [-] jonaf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lliamander|9 years ago|reply
That said, early in my career as an employee, prior to reading any advice by recruiters, I made a decision to not accept counter-offers as a general rule. My main reasons are the ones people usually cite: a) if I am dissatisfied enough with my job that I applied for other jobs, it is almost certainly not (just) about the money, and b) my relationship with both employers becoming strained.
So far it has worked out for me, and I don't plan on changing that, but I'll be sure to keep this in mind in the future.
[+] [-] peteretep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imagist|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbb555|9 years ago|reply
I recruiter was not happy and basically told me that I wouldn't get anything else, and if I got a reputation for turning down jobs I couldn't expect agencies to ever put me forward for anything else. They just screamed at me on the phone.
I did get another job and it was far better (for me) than the one I turned down.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cbsmith|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] FT_intern|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adekok|9 years ago|reply
After some thinking (2min... NO), and letting them stew for a few days, I told them "No". They asked if it was because of the salary. "Yes, yes, it is". They immediately doubled their offer.
Sorry, but the answer is still "No." If the first contact you have with me is that you try to screw me and assume I'm stupid, I will not work for you. I'd be better off unemployed.
I found another job 2 weeks later, for more than their second offer. And those people didn't play games.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] argonaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archildress|9 years ago|reply
The author posits that you've begun looking for a new job for a reason. There are things that you dislike about your job. That's logical, and it's the number one reason that I went on a search of my own.
The problem is that there's always some level of information asymmetry. You know everything you dislike about your current job; you can't know what you'll dislike about your new job until you begin that role.
However, once I was given another "great offer", it made me realize that part of every job is disliking certain aspects of it. No matter where you are, it's impossible to find a role that you like 100% of the time.
When I received another job offer, it made me realize that there were a lot of things that I was taking for granted about my current job. And when I notified my current employer that I was leaving, they reminded me of how valued I was with the package that they put together. In fairness, they could've done a better job with this throughout my employment.
At the end of the day, the compensation and future commitments (all of which are in writing) made it compelling to me to stay and not risk disliking my next role.
Have you ever heard the saying that you should flip a coin to make important decisions, because as soon as the coin is in the air you'll know what you want anyway? Well, I went through the coin flip process and realized I had taken a lot of things for granted at my current employer. And that's why I stayed.
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
Yea, you were so valued that they DIDN'T offer it to you until you threatened to leave. That doesn't sound like an employer that values you, it sounds like an employer who got away with a great bargain while it lasted.
[+] [-] Gibbon1|9 years ago|reply
If it didn't suck in some fundamental way it'd be a hobby not job.
[+] [-] morgante|9 years ago|reply
Sometimes your compensation simply has fallen behind market without you or your employer realizing it. Especially at a smaller company, your manager might very well not have firm sense of what your market compensation would be. A competing offer is a great way for both you and them to get your compensation up to market.
Just because you interviewed for another job does not imply you're unhappy with your current one. I try to occasionally interview just to keep a tab on the market, even when I'm entirely happy with my current job (including its compensation). In fact, the results of such interviews are often that my current job is better than anything else out there.
[+] [-] shaneos|9 years ago|reply
I did a job search, found 10 jobs I was overqualified for that were offering 60% more money, and took the list to my manager as part of my argument for a raise. For six months he delayed, said he was looking in to it etc, but in the end said there was nothing he could do, he had no flexibility.
I found a different company that I liked, accepted their offer at about 60% higher salary and told my manager I was leaving in two weeks. Within 24 hours they had matched the other salary, and thrown in some stock too.
They could clearly have done this at any time in the past six months, when I was pressing my manager on it every single week.
Of course I left. If you are worth the money, you should be paid the money, and not have to beg for it. I was at the next company for a very enjoyable four years, and even got promotions and raises without having to lobby for them and explain my impact.
[+] [-] verbify|9 years ago|reply
They had no incentive to.
I was recently in the same situation - doubled my salary after years at another place.
Until you bring proof positive that you could bring in more elsewhere there's no reason for them, there's no reason for them to take your word for it that the market would pay you more.
Companies often rely on the sunk cost of employees laziness/sunk cost.
Depending on the company, if companies gave out raises whenever anyone asked, they'd be broke pretty soon (this applies more to a company like Walmart that relies on a lot of low-paid workers compared to Bell Labs).
> I was at the next company for a very enjoyable four years, and even got promotions and raises without having to lobby for them and explain my impact.
It's likely that you started working a lot harder at the second place. I know I did.
[+] [-] enneff|9 years ago|reply
Why did you wait so long to leave?
[+] [-] thraway_perfin|9 years ago|reply
I've worked happily at one of the "big" tech companies. Without going too much into details, I ended up getting a really big offer from another one of the big guys (i.e., in the seven figure range over 4 years, obviously with the bulk of it being equity).
I was really torn. I was happy at my job, but that's a large enough of money to make a material difference in the lives of my loved ones. And like a lot of people here, I value the happiness of my family over my own.
I didn't expect my existing employer to do much. So I gave my boss an early heads up this was happening, partly because I thought there was a small chance there would, but mostly so I would leave on good terms.
Again, long story short, they not only matched the offer but came over the top of it. I went home to think about, talked about it with my wife & decided the next day to accept the counteroffer.
That was a few years ago. I've honestly been happy since then. I don't feel this was ever held over my head or held against me. (To the contrary, I was recently promoted.)
When it comes to counteroffers, a lot of it comes down to two things: 1) why you were looking in the first place, and 2) how you handle things with your existing employer.
Regarding (1) - if you were unhappy, money isn't going to fix that. Staying just because of money is dubious at best.
Regarding (2) - the main thing is don't be an asshole. Nobody is going to hold you advocating for your own best interests. Senior execs know the game. They would do the same thing in your place (if they haven't already). If you're an asshole, well, nobody wants to keep an asshole in the first place. But if you're pragmatic & even–keeled, you don't damage the relationships (even if you stay or go).
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply
Clearly, there's a lot of dramatic license built into the word "never" in the title (a less baity title would be "Be wary of counter-offers"). Clearly, there are employers that will make counters in good faith hoping to retain you for the long haul. But business is business, and many employers, even very good ones, aren't going to make irrational decisions just to be nice.
[+] [-] fecak|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setr|9 years ago|reply
This paragraph bugs me. It's as if the author assumes the workplace to be swarmed with malicious agents, and you, some ambitious, innocent and pure-hearted employee.
Why wasn't it solved before? Because it was cheaper to leave it unsolved.
Suddenly, you introduce a significant cost to leaving the problem (your leaving the company), and so it gets resolved.
And whaddyaknow, it'll happen at any other company too because its pretty damn effective way to operate a business.
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
15 months MORE. Damn. I wish I could stay that long in a single company.
Either the project is long finished, or the startup went bankrupt, or the entire department is redone, or there is somewhere else offering a significant raise, or...
Sometimes, I wonder what's the average tenancy for competent employees in a hot tech hub.
[+] [-] imagist|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel_iversen|9 years ago|reply
Just like the article suggests not to accept a counter offer I'd say don't ever GIVE a counter offer (or try to keep the employee resigning).
Of course always treat your people well and try your best to resolve issues and keep on top of their aspirations and desires but when they've already made up their mind to resign and they actually resign rarely (in my limited experience) can anything good come from you persuading them to stay because:
A) they'll likely leave anyway within 1-1.5 years B) they might never actually have left and they're using very poor/immoral negotiation tactics C) it sends a horrible sign to the other employees saying they (only) get ahead if they threaten to resign
And you have to be pretty fil with whatever your convictions are here I believe. So in my view the article is right - never accept a counter offer (I did once and while it was a bit promotion it was a huge mistake) but also never give one!
[+] [-] thembones|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] udev|9 years ago|reply
But whatever it was, he seems convinced that he has seen the light, and even distilled the message to "Never accept a counter-offer", which is nothing but a loud, attention grabbing, media-optimized title, but also, ultimately too-general-to-be-useful type of advice.
The text itself is lacking useful information, maybe with the exceptions of the link to the surveys.
As I get older I observe how smart people tend to put in a large amount of work before they feel ready to disseminate their carefully created, validated, humble in scope, and very often valuable message.
This is the opposite of that.
[+] [-] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
When my boss realized I was moving, he offered me to work remotely. I said I had already accepted the new offer, and left. Boss said I was always welcome back if I changed my mind (The idea of a big raise never came up at this point). A year later, the old boss contacted me and offered me to work remotely, and matched the salary of the bigger city I was living in, so I signed back to the old company with a deal that was likely better than what I could have gotten had accepted to stay initially.
Bottom line is: - Keep good relations with employers where you like working: - A good way of getting a raise might sometimes be leaving and then returning.
[+] [-] evo_9|9 years ago|reply
The next work day - monday 12/24 - I'm working from home and I get a call from HR; they fired me over the phone on xmas-eve, apparently the 3 employees I had the late conversation with went to HR and claimed I was bragging about the raise and that the only way to get a raise at the company was to get another job and threaten to leave. No amount of explaining that's not happened would appease them, and as they put it they had '3 peoples word against just you'.
So yeah I will never accept a count-offer again!
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|9 years ago|reply
I tend to agree with the rule "don't entertain counter offers", but if you think you may get one, discuss it directly. A lot of employers will be very honest about your total comp and why they level you there. It's often about their own costs, their own "grid" of salaries, and because they have a "system", they can't really pay you more unless you're promoted to management. It could be about you and if that's the case, they probably view you as expendable and you should almost certainly move on.
Whatever you do, try to minimize the emotions and focus on all of the tangible aspects.
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|9 years ago|reply
The money is a symptom. Even if your current employer counteroffers, the fact that you got them to cough up the extra dough doesn't change the fact that they didn't value you enough to retain you with it in the first place.
If money/title/growth/etc. are important, and you've made it clear to your manager sufficiently, and they still don't act: go. The counteroffer won't change the underlying dynamic, and its other symptoms will continue to manifest.
[+] [-] merpnderp|9 years ago|reply
Labor is part of a market where people get to decide how much their labor is worth. Take full advantage of that, as employers certainly will.
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setr|9 years ago|reply
And now you have some new company who is paying the market rate, in other words, evaluating your position against the total market. Your company, which was at best evaluating your position within their own corporation, is now forced to do a market-scale re-evaluation. With the poaching offer as the baseline, since you've been tagged by someone as being worth that much (and willing to pay it).
And now you've got a big boost in pay. Not because your C_Os were gathering together in the dark halls of the Bedlam basements, black robed, circled around the Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh Liber Razielis Archangeli, poring over your employee review, whispering amongst themselves "yes, yes, he's a quiet man; he won't complain and he won't tire; give him a penny more and he won't trouble another year; the fucking fool".
All it is is that there was never a reason to do more work than necessary. And no reason to pay more than necessary.
Y'know, don't programmers have a similar saying?
[+] [-] jlgaddis|9 years ago|reply
Never say never.
[+] [-] jimmywanger|9 years ago|reply
The employee now knows that he could have gotten the same thing the employer is now offering before the counteroffer.
The employer knows that the employee is spending a non-trivial amount of time to interview and talk to other employers.
I agree there should be no trust here, but we are conditioned to think that there should be.
Exceptions aside (and you don't know if you're in one of those exceptions), a counter offer allows you to exist in a poisoned relationship for a few more months.
[+] [-] imagist|9 years ago|reply
This only matters if the employee was under the delusion that the company had the employee's best interests in mind. This is true at very few companies. If your company speaks of itself as if it's "a family", it's likely that this is just an attempt to create employee loyalty that they can leverage into lower salaries.
> The employer knows that the employee is spending a non-trivial amount of time to interview and talk to other employers.
This only matters if the employer is under the delusion that their employees are in it for anything other than money. It would be extraordinarily difficult to prop up this delusion in the tech industry where staying at companies more than two years is unusual, so I can't imagine many employers care.
> I agree there should be no trust here, but we are conditioned to think that there should be.
If you agree there should be no trust here, why are you making an argument based on trust?
Just because people are conditioned to think something which allows them to be exploited doesn't mean they should stick to the exploitable thinking in the rare case where it ceases to be exploitable.
[+] [-] robalfonso|9 years ago|reply
Its not always about shafting an individual so much as managing the entire business.
This can also be wholly subjective to the company, culture, boss, and employee.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|9 years ago|reply
Basically, he did his job well and took on steadily increasing responsibilities as the company expanded rapidly, and in five years he went from a minor role in a small business to a critical role in a large business. One day his bosses suddenly realized that their senior system administrator was working for peanuts and any of their competitors would love to have him.
They gave him a 50% raise on the spot. He hadn't even been thinking about other work.
[+] [-] hodgesrm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
There are always exceptions, even more, there are cases when accepting a counter-offer is a right decision (your cat dies and you need bunch of money to save her).
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|9 years ago|reply
It did make me curious. I think an alternative way to read it (as opposed to the "why didn't I get this sooner?" attitude from the article) is "why didn't I ask for a pay-rise sooner?". This has made me more confident in dealing with employers; I'm about to ask my current one for a rise and I think I'll get it.
It's quite nice to leave it open-ended, too. If an employer dangles the promise of 'more money' in front of you, but you don't actually go into details, you can always fantasise that it was going to be twice as big as it actually was. That way, you'll probably aim higher in future than if you'd found out the full details.
[+] [-] losteverything|9 years ago|reply
SVP:Is Joe Blow good?
Me: yes. Critical
SVP: why?
Me: runs acqusition system. Only one that knows it. Smart too
SVP: thanks.
-- I left with my escort and called my boss. "What was that about?" said Joe quit and his salary request to stay needed Executive approval. So SVP asked to talk to someone who directs his work (me).