When You Get a Job Counteroffer: Should You Stay or Should You Go?

I was in this situation four months ago. Frankly, I interviewed for the new job because it came with an attractive salary, but there had also been recent layoffs at my old job and I was interested in moving on anyway.

In the end, I'm glad I turned down the counteroffer and got out - I do think that my relationships would have been poisoned if I had stayed, and some core issues would not have been fixed. That said - I should not have taken the job I did. Chasing money was a rookie move, and I'm now more unhappy than I was at the previous company.

My advice is to think very realistically, perhaps pessimistically, about what life will be like at the new company. If you're not sure, ask questions. Don't take a new job because you want to get out - take a new job because you want out AND because the new job is freaking amazing. I'm now job hunting all over again, and it sucks.

I previously worked at Microsoft. When I told my boss that I was leaving he asked a very polite question (I don't remember the exact wording) asking whether this was open for negotiation, and I told him no, that I had signed an offer and intended to take it. We moved on to discussing how I would close out my existing work items.

When a friend of mine (also at Microsoft) told his boss that he had a job offer from Google, but wasn't explicit about whether he had accepted it yet, they bent over backwards to try and persuade him to stay — offering, among other things, the promotion that he'd been passed over for in the previous two review cycles (so much for no promotion budget), pulling in upper management to spend time with him to persuade him to stay. All this just served to communicate to him how messed up his situation had been, if they can promote you now, why couldn't they before?

As long as you have been clear with your management about your expectations w.r.t. pay/promotion/work etc. then any counteroffer is simply an open display of organizational misanthropy.

w.r.t. Microsoft, one of the unspoken flaws in their review system is/was that by the time a review is delivered to an employee, it is too late to fix anything. If you think you deserved a promotion/bigger bonus/merit increase/whatever it has to wait until the next review cycle (a year) to be corrected (unless your manager is really prepared to fight hard for you and do things out of cycle—possible but hard)

Counteroffers are frequently made out of desperation more than anything else. "Holy shit, Bob is leaving?!? I didn't even know he wasn't happy. Quick, put together something that'll keep him around."

The problem with this is that the people making the counteroffer often feel they are doing so, effectively, at gunpoint: give me a bag of cash right now, or lose a key cog in your machine. "Nice company you've got there. Sure would be a shame if something were to... happen to it." So they are often made grudgingly, which leads to bad feelings. And if they are accepted the bad feelings go deeper, because now the people making the counteroffer feel like you put one over on them. So paradoxically, taking their counteroffer can hurt your relationships with those people pretty deeply, while rejecting it can keep them stable or even improve them -- when you walk away, they can interpret it as you choosing not to put one over on them.

None of this makes any logical sense, of course, but we're talking here about emotional decisionmaking, which has very little to do with logic.

Perhaps he said he needed a change (not more money) because he was feeling burnt out or lost motivation on the project he was working on and perhaps in an attempt to keep him his employer tried throwing more money at him. Perhaps he turned down the more money offer because it really wasn't about money. Perhaps 6 months later he was rejuvenated and because his boss could see his leaving 6 months earlier wasn't just an attempt to "extort" more money but legitimately about burn out he hired him back on.

Perhaps it would make more sense if it said "because he hadn’t played games and hadn't acted unethically"

The way companies work in real life, having an offer in hand gives your manager more motivation and leverage (to get more money for you) than he has to help an employee who is not seen as "in play." In other words, to improve your situation at a good but not perfect job, you sometimes need to get an external offer. Maybe that's not how it should be, but it's demonstrably how it is.

You have ongoing relationships with people, including your managers and co-workers - don't burn those. But your "relationship" with your employer [company], at least in Silicon Valley, is transactional.