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Never accept a counter-offer
191–200 of 369 posts
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also a recruiter and was about to write an identical comment, so thankyou
Good to hear. Most recruiters stick to the "counteroffers are bad" script pretty closely in all the articles they post. It's just dishonest and makes us all look bad.
I also spent a long time as a developer and successfully took counter offers a few times. Sometimes it really is just about the money, and your line manager needed the impetus to justify the cost to their manager
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How did you get clients initially? He said it, contacts and social skills. One other way is referrals but you generally need to have a few clients before that starts happening.
> "contacts and social skills" I'm curious too, because that's what everyone says, but they stop there. It's always: 1. Have contacts and social skills 2. ??? 3. Make 6X as a freelancer! Let's say I'm starting with contacts and social skills. And a mortgage and a full-time job that lets me pay it. Any good books or blog posts that describe what's in step 2?
The reason it always seems to stop at step one is because the experience feels like a natural consequence of those two factors. A step two would be something like "exercise those social skills with your contacts" and that seems redundant. 'social skills' encompasses discussing professional situations and (unfortunately or not) being a person your 'contacts' are attracted to and comfortable with extending opportunity to.
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have the experience, contacts and social skills (very underestimated by many professionals in our field) you can make much more as a freelancer/contractor. I'm now self employed for 4 years and I earn 6x as much as I earned in my last job. (though I believe I was underpaid in my last job)
How does freelancing income compare to working as a senior engineer at a big corp ($300k total comp if you include bonuses, benefits and subsidized health insurance)?
I have done both. It's all highly dependent on your situation, but for me freelancing is higher income (~400k vs ~250k at bigcorp), much more autonomy (I can work wherever I like, subcontract out the tedious things, etc), but also much more stress. I worked considerably less at bigcorp but in the end I couldn't get over the whole having to come into the office and look busy thing.
I personally value the autonomy over almost anything else -- I can live in a low cost-of-living city with my wife for half the year, go skiing/mountain biking over lunch, and overall spend more time among the people I care about. But that does come with all the stress of building a client base, chasing down payment, explaining to non-technical people why their ideas aren't feasible and I can't build Siri in 3 weeks, etc.
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree on many levels...the coworker was an idiot and a project manager, not an engineer, but had an MBA, which likely appealed to the founders, who were both "business guys". Also, it was silly to have sensitive info on a shared drive where anyone could see it. It was probably less than ethical for me to use that info in negotiations, but it couldn't be unseen.
I don't think it was unethical. In fact, finding out there is a salary disparity between peers is probably one of the most common ways that large salary raises occur. For that reason, and also because that disparity may result in legal liability if the peers have differing demographic profiles, some companies threaten to terminate anyone who reveals his or her salary to another employee.
> ... some companies threaten to terminate anyone who reveals his or her salary to another employee.
after this, i was wondering if there is a way to get the average salary of a group without revealing / knowing actual numbers ?
edit-001: ok, one thing that i can think of:
1. take a big number, and add your salary to it. this becomes the 'token' for the next guy.
2. he adds his salary to the number. etc. etc.
once you have the final number, remove the original number, and divide by number of folks. since this scheme appears to be so trivial, i am now wondering what i did wrong ?
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#196I once worked in a company where the only way to get a raise was to get a counter offer. Each year even the best people were getting raises lower than the cost of life increase.
The employees were so unmotivated, all they wanted was to find another job.
Don't take a counter offer, flee those kind of places.
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#197I 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…
> 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.
Why did you wait so long to leave?
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#198A better way of looking at this is to be honest with your employer about your happiness in your role. Feel like you're not paid enough? Not challenged? Difficulty with teammates or manager? Raise these issues. If you are not taken seriously, then you know you are in the wrong place, and can look for something else without even needing to consider entertaining a counter-offer.
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the best advice I've ever gotten, and I'm so glad I followed it, is to ignore details like what the product is entirely, and pick the team to join solely based on the manager. It's worked out very well. There was a survey I remember reading earlier this year about how the single biggest factor causing dissatisfaction at work is having a bad boss.
How do you identify a good manager? I ask because I've had both good and bad but no indication of which is which at the beginning. Some seemed super engaged when interviewing but disappeared once I started working.
Its much easier if its within the same org, of course, but even in another company, you can possibly talk to the people who will work with you under the same manager and ask them. Unfortunately, there isn't any surefire way of knowing whether you will work under a good manager, just as there is no surefire way for the company to know you will be a stellar employee.
Personally, what I look for the most is honesty. Even if the product/company is crap, if the people working on it are honest about their current state and where they want to be in the future, I find that much more interesting than a well-known established company whose manager is just OK.
Re: Never accept a counter-offer
#200We had a couple people accept our counter offer then use it as leverage to get a better third opportunity a couple months down the road.
Which is ok. Every paycheck is a renewed offer to stay. Every employee should periodically reevaluate their employment deal, and survey whether a better deal is available. Folks like to throw in 'loyalty' and 'responsibility' here. But I've never seen a company mention those things at layoff time. It has to be a two-way street. And even if a company does try to be 'loyal' to employees by renegotiating terms during ec…
I guess my point was for those people they ended up with a much better third option by accepting our counter offer. If they had said no to our counter offer they would have been worse off.