Never accept a counter-offer • Hacker News Board

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#291

Post by jsmthrowaway » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #205

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many employers would take offense and consider it an insult, If they do, flee. Business is business and if people are getting offended about business, something is wrong.

Easy to say, but not how it works in the real world. If you walk in to your boss's office and accuse him of underpaying you, he's going to feel hurt. That's the natural reaction. Telling him "business is business" is not likely to improve his feelings. Business would be better named "pampering giant babies", because that's what it is. Despite the mythology that we're programmed with, most of the work of being in char…

I assure you that you're frighteningly wrong about everything here and that your own personal insecurities are reinforcing a flawed opinion about how business works. I'm not sure how to communicate that to you, though. I'm genuinely at a loss about how to explain that your comment is extremely bad advice and is the type of outlook that most people who can't assert themselves develop.

The most important thing in anything, not just business, is not what people think of you. The whole purpose of your employment is to exchange your value for their value; why would feelings get involved if you recalculate your own value? You're asking poorly if people get offended, or the person you're asking does a poor job of separating emotion and business (literally step one of succeeding in business).

Do you really think Tim Cook gets up before sunrise to manage his SVPs' feelings? Your observations about what business actually is speak more to you than they do "the real world"; speaking of, since your opening retort was a slightly condescending explanation of that real world which I assure you I live in as well, I suspect the problem with your outlook reflects on you. But I don't mean that to belittle you. Just that perhaps the outcomes you experience come from how you approach things and not a firm understanding of business.

Might be worth some introspection here. Maybe I'm totally wrong but if I am, a whole lot of people who aren't you are too.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#292

Post by phibz » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

sbrother wrote: post #194

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)?

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…

I've been doing contract work for the last 6 years. In the markets I'm in Dallas and Chicago for my skill set (18 years) i'm finding it easy to find jobs at $125/hr but not much more than that. Even at that number I get lots of "thanks but no thanks." My most recent project, Apache Kafka and Spark, is only $115/hr. Which is close to $250k/yr but not any where near $400k/yr. I'm wondering where you're finding clients willing to pay this much and what type of work are you doing?

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#293

Post by gvb » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

corecoder wrote: post #221

ufmace wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, you could make the argument that the company makes more money in the long run by keeping the most productive employees with the most institutional knowledge around long-term, which requires really paying attention to what they want before they start looking elsewhere, keeping up with what market rates are and giving raises and bonuses appropriately, etc. As a rational business owner, would you rather pay out an e…

When it comes to business owners, rationality is overrated. I've seen a lot of companies that are perfectly happy hiring a less competent dev that accepts 20% less, and takes more than twice the time to do the work.

To the accounting department it is perfectly rational. In the accounting department everybody is an identical square in the spreadsheet.

In the spreadsheet, if square "A23" takes n hours to accomplish a task, the spreadsheet tells them they saved n x 0.2. This means that the longer it takes square "A23" to accomplish a task, the more the company appears to "save" in the spreadsheet.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#294

Post by Shivetya » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

just remember that not everything is about earning more money, sometimes the best career moves may involve making less and with reduced stress and angst

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#295

Post by imagist » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

jimmywanger wrote: post #42

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…

> 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.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#296

Post by jrockway » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:42 PM UTC

fecak wrote: post #251

jrockway wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course it's not career suicide for a software engineer, and recruiters that make such claims should lose credibility with a candidate when they say these things. The recruiter counteroffer "script" ("career suicide", "you'll be fired once they can replace you", "you'll never get a promotion", "you'll be an outcast at work", etc.) is all stuff that could happen (other than the suicide part), but is highly unlikely…

> The recruiter counteroffer "script" ("career suicide", "you'll be fired once they can replace you", "you'll never get a promotion", "you'll be an outcast at work", etc.)

Sounds like you can just say, "I guess I'll go work for you then."

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#297

Post by imagist » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:43 PM UTC

robalfonso wrote: post #262

jimmywanger wrote: post #42

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…

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.

> Its not always about shafting an individual so much as managing the entire business.

I read this as: It's not always about shafting an individual so much as shafting all the employees who will let you shaft them.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#298

Post by jrockway » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

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…

> I would never work in this town again, etc.

Of course they contacted you in 6 months and begged you to reconsider their offer, right? ;)

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#299

Post by nthj » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:49 PM UTC

phibz wrote: post #292

sbrother wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been doing contract work for the last 6 years. In the markets I'm in Dallas and Chicago for my skill set (18 years) i'm finding it easy to find jobs at $125/hr but not much more than that. Even at that number I get lots of "thanks but no thanks." My most recent project, Apache Kafka and Spark, is only $115/hr. Which is close to $250k/yr but not any where near $400k/yr. I'm wondering where you're finding clients…

patio11 has a lot of articles and comments about charging by the week. From your comment, that sounds like how you'd make the leap; you get a lot more autonomy as well.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#300

Post by bcbrown » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

jrjarrett wrote: post #272

CydeWeys wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people don't. Hell, my last job change occurred because I was contacted by a recruiter from what was literally my dream job for the past decade (you don't ignore an email like that). I was content in my previous job and not actively looking, and had actually been promoted to lead developer not a year prior.

How DO YOU GET these? The only recruitment calls I ever get are from body-shop class contracting firms that never manage to even come close to my current compensation for scut work.

I get them through LinkedIn. I have a well-written, informative profile that's peppered with Big Data buzzwords.