Never accept a counter-offer

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, many involving information access).

Businesses, and recruiters, such as the one offering this exceptionally poor advice, have far more data, and far more experience than any given single worker in engaging in labour negotiations. Hell: It is their core competency.

Accepting the terms of an employer or recruiter in engaging in the battle directly is the worst possible thing you can do. Which includes this still-born advice to never accept a counteroffer.

Are there counteroffers you shouldn't accept? Yes. Are there counteroffers you should accept? Yes. You'll find discussion in this thread on both sets of circumstances.

(A general guideline: if it's the money that's been what's making you unhappy at a given job, go for it. If it's been other matters, that is what you should be negotiating on, though sweetening the pot doesn't hurt either.)

The degree of ignorance exhibited by far too many technologists on the concepts of negotiating, power, leverage, and advantage is vast. I include myself. I can only suggest: go out and start studying the literature, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, J.K. Galbraith's The Anatomy of Power, and books on sales and negotiation. I'm finding older works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries particularly informative -- there's much more openness about direct tactics, and a distinct lack of embarassment in discussing them. More recent material can be useful and will show additional tricks, and advances in psychology, but I find that the traditional insights themselves are quite telling.

Michael O. Church has much to say on the inequalities, including overt blacklists, which exist within Silicon Valley and elsewhere, which may be illuminating: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/what-i-fough...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negoti...

Top independent freelance software developers can make $300k if they work hard and have a good network, as can top big corp engineers. Of course, neither is easy to achieve and the metrics are different. (Freelancers are valued on their results, big corps hire on pedigree and games.)

Sometimes your compensation simply has fallen behind market without you or your employer realizing it. Especially at a smaller company, your manager might very well not have firm sense of what your market compensation would be. A competing offer is a great way for both you and them to get your compensation up to market.

Just because you interviewed for another job does not imply you're unhappy with your current one. I try to occasionally interview just to keep a tab on the market, even when I'm entirely happy with my current job (including its compensation). In fact, the results of such interviews are often that my current job is better than anything else out there.

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 do. Sometimes savvy employees even have more info than I do (they can go out an interview to assess the market, while I can't interview people just to see what offer they'd accept).

Of course, there are also cases of flagrant underpayment (ex. paying <$100k for an engineer in SV) which should drive you away automatically.

If they do, flee. Business is business and if people are getting offended about business, something is wrong.