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Never accept a counter-offer

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Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#231

Post by jrockway »

fecak wrote: post #18

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 accep…

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.)

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#232

Post by MagnumOpus »

wyclif wrote: post #213
tptacek wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once accepted a counter that included a pay raise, a substantial equity grant, and had my requirements for role adjustments mostly met --- all offered entirely to prevent me from moving to a new job. I shouldn't have! Things were O.K. for about six months, and only then did it clear that I'd been sidelined --- after the company had put in motion its plans for post-me continuity. Basically: they bought themselves ti…

Flight risks get managed differently Assuming a large percentage of software developers leave for new gigs every 2-3 years, even in the best companies [that is an assumption on my part; I don't know if it's true or only anecdotal], why do you think the overhead for "flight risk" is so high? I mean, getting tagged as someone heading out the door is a temporary situation for most devs, not a long-term debilitation.

Ideal situation is to have contingencies in place for every member of the company. Realistically it is relatively easy to have backups for producing employees where there are multiple in a team anyway - devs, ops, designers - than for managerial employees. (Managers groom their own backups iff they want to get promoted.)

So if you are a flight risk, you are unlikely to become a manager or given any additional "unique" responsibilities in terms of tech-lead or customer-facing work, unless your skills are really extraordinary and indispensable (and usually they aren't).

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#233

Post by omahlama »

Accepting the counter offer may not be a great strategy, but listening to it is. When changing jobs the last time, my old employer offered a salary bump to keep me. When I told this to my new employer, they immediately offered to match the salary. I ended up making more money than I would have otherwise.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#234

Post by cjrp »

vonmoltke wrote: post #153
FT_intern wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

That's senior engineer at an elite big corp in one of two or three locations in the US. It's a pretty rare (relatively speaking) position to be in.

Locations with high costs of living too.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#235

Post by madeofpalk »

Clubber wrote: post #100
bunderbunder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At many companies there are HR policies that make it extremely difficult for your manager to just give you a raise. Oftentimes these policies don't apply to counteroffers. I don't have any opinion on whether this is a good idea or not, but I do think that getting an offer somewhere else can at least be a plausible strategy - possibly the only plausible strategy - for getting a decent raise if you find yourself workin…

Yes, that's another unfortunate thing HR does. If I'm so miserable that I've actively sought, interviewed and received an offer, I'm gone. Like someone else alluded to, most shitty jobs aren't shitty because of pay. I've worked at 2 companies in the last 14 years and they both got really shitty after being acquired by a private equity firm. It usually takes 2 years until it's unbearable. I stayed so long because they…

> If I'm so miserable that I've actively sought

You don't have to be miserable just to look for another job that will pay more.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#236

Post by dahauns »

byoung2 wrote: post #207
morsch wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[H]ow I would never work in this town again I can see where the arguments about trust etc are coming from (not that I necessarily agree), but that one I don't get at all.

She said that neither she nor anyone else at her recruiting firm would work with me ever again, which lasted about a year before they started emailing me job listings again. Be prepared if you accept a counteroffer after working with a recruiter, they will definitely hold it against you (that fee is 20% of your first year salary or more), plus it makes them look bad to the company they're working for.

Whoa...so she basically tried to blackmail you into declining the counteroffer? What the hell?

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#237

Post by pmarreck »

byoung2 wrote: post #36
fecak wrote: post #18

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 accep…

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…

This here is a smart negotiator

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#238

Post by Zelmor »

fecak wrote: post #86
gregpilling wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can. Its a great job when people are hiring, you have lots of income. When the jobs vanish during a recession, you don't make any money and starve. If you are able to manage the up and down cycle, its great.

I've been through two periods of it being bad (2000 and the later recession) but I managed to do well enough. Lots of recruiters leave the market during the down cycles, and when it's up we get tons of newbies. You only need a phone/email and a LinkedIn account to jump in the field at the lowest level.

I'm working on embedded linux devices as a software tester and part technical writer, however, I have managed to get around 6 of my friends and ex-coworkers positions in the past 12 months, with another three going with counter-, or other offers. This year I have realized that I've become a lot of peoples' go-to person for creating better CVs, LinkedIn profiles and cover letters for applications.

Living in the EU is somewhat limiting in the legal and financial sense, because I am unsure about cross-country pay-outs, recruitment and legislation. Do you happen to have sources where I could learn more about these things? I might just make it a side-business to my existing one to refer people as a recruiter agency, not simply via already in-house acquaintances (which yield mediocre referral bonuses in many cases).

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#239

Post by byoung2 »

cr1895 wrote: post #227
byoung2 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you quit to freelance? I have a daughter (turning 4 this month) and I wanted to work from home and have a more flexible schedule. I applied for a few companies that offered remote work, but the schedules weren't that flexible (they all seemed to have core hours, except WordPress, which was a top contender). I also love to travel...my wife and I average 6 weeks of vacation and a dozen or more countries per yea…

>She is a registered nurse, so she can easily get a month off at a time Tangential, but...a friend of mine is an RN in an ICU who works nights (how he copes with the long hours is beyond me). He's struggled to get a single week off, much less an entire month without quarrel. Turnover is high, they're shortstaffed, etc. What is different about your wife's hospital (maybe there's less pressure and more nurses available…

She works for Kaiser in the DOU (direct observation unit, ICU stepdown). To get a calendar month off she schedules it almost a year in advance. 2 weeks off she can do with a month notice. A week off usually only requires switching a day or two with another nurse since she only works 3 days a week.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#240

Post by Gibbon1 »

archildress wrote: post #13

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 asymme…

> it made me realize that part of every job is disliking certain aspects of it.

If it didn't suck in some fundamental way it'd be a hobby not job.

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