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Never accept a counter-offer

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Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#341

Post by dredmorbius »

fecak wrote: post #263
dredmorbius wrote: post #182

Five letters: BATNA What is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement? In any negotiation, with any party, your strength lies in your ability to walk away. If a vendor isn't offering you the product, or features, or price, you want, then having the alternative to walk elsewhere gives you strength. It's what lies at the foundation of the concept of a competitive market (though there are other elements as well, m…

I'm pretty sure the author of this story isn't a recruiter, no?

Per his posted bio, no, so I'd flubbed that. From discussion on page and reading the article, that wasn't clear.

Note that recruiters, founders, and hiring managers can have similar biases though.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#342

Post by robin_hood_jr »

morgante wrote: post #188
ryandrake wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Losing a team member sucks. But being paid below market rate also sucks. By making a counter-offer and having it accepted, you're now setting a precedent. All of that person's peers will now see that the way to get a raise at this company is to constantly be interviewing and threatening to leave. Is that the environment you're trying to foster?

> But being paid below market rate also sucks. Where is this mythical "market rate" that I as an employee or employer can constantly get access to? Every employee has their own market rate and that rate is determined by BATNA negotiations. If I'm hiring someone, I don't have market rate for them in mind which I try to pay under. As a manager at a small company, you barely have more info on market rates than employees…

83k fml

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#343

Post by mikekchar »

FT_intern wrote: post #340
mikekchar wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you bringing to the table that would entice a recruiter to do that? If you are such a hot commodity that it is worth the recruiter to give you part of their commission, then why do you need a recruiter at all? It will be easier to negotiate a signing bonus from your new employer if you don't go through a recruiter.

>What are you bringing to the table that would entice a recruiter to do that? Because it would cost him more in time to find another candidate than to give you a cut. This is assuming you've passed the interviews.

So you're going to get a job offer and then demand a cut from the recruiter before accepting? Good luck ever getting another recruiter in the future. I absolutely guarantee that this will not work.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#344

Post by wtracy »

vonmoltke wrote: post #258
wtracy wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The median income in the US (in 2014) was $29k. The median salary for a software engineer is supposedly $95k. That's more than triple the overall median. Sources: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-...

That's the average salary for a software engineer, not the median. Also, the SSA site uses "net compensation" for their numbers, which they define as "compensation (wages, tips, and the like) subject to Federal income taxes, as reported by employers on Form W-2" and "includes contributions to deferred compensation plans, but excludes certain distributions from plans where the distributions are included in the reporte…

I could have sworn that page said median, not average. Thanks for the correction.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#345

Post by wtracy »

st3v3r wrote: post #335
wtracy wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The median income in the US (in 2014) was $29k. The median salary for a software engineer is supposedly $95k. That's more than triple the overall median. Sources: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/software-engineer-salary-...

That median salary includes fast food workers and other low/non skilled positions. Comparing our profession against that is dishonest.

You completely lost me. We weren't discussing the median skilled wage, we were discussing the median wage. The median wage is the median of all wages.

Trying to redefine words in the middle of an argument strikes me as dishonest.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#346

Post by coldtea »

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…

>My recruiter practically broke down in tears when I accepted a counteroffer in 2013.

Sounds like he/she didn't make a wise career choice. So why the duck did they feel qualified to guide others to jobs?

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#347

Post by gogopuppygogo »

coldtea wrote: post #346
byoung2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> My recruiter practically broke down in tears when I accepted a counteroffer in 2013. Sounds like he/she didn't make a wise career choice. So why the duck did they feel qualified to guide others to jobs?

Recruiting is a sales job. Its the only sales job I know of where you can sell a product, the contract can be signed and the product can change it's mind and you don't get paid. It's brutal.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#348

Post by signa11 »

graywh wrote: post #310
signa11 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What threat model are you defending against? umm, not really trying to prevent from folks actively sabotage the whole thing, but just seeing if it actually works i.e gives the correct average salary... but yes, as you have pointed out, people at N and N+2 can collude to get the original salary (for N+1).

Have a third party generate a set of tokens, one per person, recording only their sum, and randomly distribute them to the group. Then you don't need to pass the cumulative sum from person to person. Edit: I guess it doesn't even have to be a third party as long as everyone trusts the randomization (e.g., pulling identical pieces of folded paper from a hat).

> Have a third party generate a set of tokens, one per person, recording only their sum, and randomly distribute them to the group

oooh :) this is pretty cool. thank you !

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#349

Post by imagist »

jimmywanger wrote: post #339
imagist wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 dispute that. I generally stay at companies for 4 or 5 years, and I know multiple people who have stayed at Google for 10 years. >If you agree there should be no trust here, why are you making an argument based on trust? I'm not maki…

> I dispute that. I generally stay at companies for 4 or 5 years, and I know multiple people who have stayed at Google for 10 years.

Yeah, but Google isn't representative of the industry as a whole.

> I'm not making an argument.

You said, "Counteroffers are poison for both the employee and the company." That's a very strong position you're taking.

> I'm saying that trust (rightly or wrongly) sometimes seems like something that should be expected (to those who haven't been working for a while especially) and can be used to guilt people into acting in not their own best interests, or to act in a retaliatory way against employees.

This is true, but inapplicable to the decision of whether to take a counteroffer. If you're the employee, "I might be being guilted into not acting in self-interest" is a concern that doesn't really support OR oppose taking counteroffers in general, it's just a general consideration (and the answer is basically to recognize that most companies only care about you as much as you can produce value for them). And while certainly some employers are prone to acting in a retaliatory way toward employees who look elsewhere, making a counteroffer is exactly the opposite of retaliatory behavior--it's recognizing that the loyalty ploy didn't work, and renegotiating.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#350

Post by peteretep »

simonswords82 wrote: post #269
fecak wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly based on my experience with recruiters the majority of them make you all look bad.

I think it helps to hug a specific community or two, and build a solid reputation.
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