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Never accept a counter-offer

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Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#271

Post by engi_nerd »

technofiend wrote: post #139
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…

I worked at a savings and loan back during the 1988/1989 crisis that took them out and we were no different. Hired as a 'C' programmer I was quickly turned into a Sybase DBA, sys-admin and anything else I could handle. In fact I ended up writing an in-house payroll system so like you I had inside information. When the sys-admin left I asked for a raise since I was doing his job and my own. They made some excuses abou…

Oh, the joys of sticking it to a particularly evil boss. I got this exact same satisfaction when I left my job working on sounding rockets. The boss was a micromanager who was eventually demoted (and then left the company) after I left, because he had driven away more than half his department.

Two days before I left, he had been threatening, in a roundabout way, to fire me. But when I handed in my resignation letter, he was eager to keep me and asked what it would take to keep me. I named the salary my next job was offering. "You'll make more than I do now!" he said.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#272

Post by jrjarrett »

CydeWeys wrote: post #147
vonmoltke wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm so miserable that I've actively sought, interviewed and received an offer, I'm gone. Do you not look around unless you are miserable?

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.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#273

Post by merpnderp »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #264

A note of agreement: The money is a symptom. Even if your current employer counteroffers, the fact that you got them to cough up the extra dough doesn't change the fact that they didn't value you enough to retain you with it in the first place. If money/title/growth/etc. are important, and you've made it clear to your manager sufficiently, and they still don't act: go. The counteroffer won't change the underlying dyn…

It's not that they didn't value you, it's that you made an agreement to sell your services at a given price. If you no longer like the agreement let them know. Anyone worth working for won't have hard feelings that you've decided you're worth more.

Labor is part of a market where people get to decide how much their labor is worth. Take full advantage of that, as employers certainly will.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#274

Post by JorgeGT »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #137
donretag wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once was searching for a file locally (Windows) and my search ended up searching the shared drive of my company, which contained a zip file. Inside this zip file were excel spreadsheets containing the salaries of all employees (around 50 IIRC). The instructions from the CEO were to limit raises due to the economic conditions at the time (very true). Apparently the tech manager was not as good fighting for us, since…

This is one of the many benefits to working for a high performing manager. They will have more clout to argue on your behalf for raises and promotions. Not to mention it's easier to grow around higher caliber people.

Another advantage is that they are confident of their position and do not feel the need to put you down / downplay your achievements.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#275

Post by cwilkes »

morsch wrote: post #48
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…

[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.

I believe that's a tongue in cheek reference to the movie industry in Hollywood where this is (was?) a common phrase.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#276

Post by fecak »

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.

This is sadly accurate. I've had unemployed entry-level candidates say 'no thanks', and I have the benefit of a decent reputation based on my writings. It's getting difficult to do the job.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#277

Post by adekok »

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…

I have a related story about job offers. I had a job offer fresh out of University, for about half of what the standard salary was at the time.

After some thinking (2min... NO), and letting them stew for a few days, I told them "No". They asked if it was because of the salary. "Yes, yes, it is". They immediately doubled their offer.

Sorry, but the answer is still "No." If the first contact you have with me is that you try to screw me and assume I'm stupid, I will not work for you. I'd be better off unemployed.

I found another job 2 weeks later, for more than their second offer. And those people didn't play games.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#278

Post by ufmace »

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.

There certainly are plenty of companies out there like that. I tend to think that generalizing like that is dicey, though. The good, well-managed companies out there tend to keep the same developers for a long time, and any that leave tend to not have many complaints. The poorly managed companies tend to churn through lots and lots of developers, many of whom will go on to write blog and forum posts on how irrational and cutthroat business is. Thus the noise about poor management is louder than the reality.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#279

Post by CydeWeys »

saiya-jin wrote: post #229
CydeWeys wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a senior engineer at a big corp, I feel like I have lot more free time available to me than if I were a freelancer. I don't have to worry about business details, contracts, hell, really even deadlines. In order to contract out for a comparable amount of money I think I'd have to spend a lot more time and deal with a lot more stress. Plus, you don't get paid vacation as a freelancer, whereas I get as much paid vaca…

vacations, one of the worst parts of freelancing - it's not the price of it (usually flight tickets + some cash on the spot, all manageable), but the income lost while having fun that hurts bad. combine it with some mortgage, and self-pressure to just work leaves you missing some nice experiences in life (while having some extra cash too)

Yeah, I'll be honest, I'm not the best at taking vacations. I've never used all my vacation time at any of my jobs, and have always gotten paid out handsomely for the excess upon leaving. Of course, once I actually do get out on a vacation, I inevitably enjoy it, but there's so much inertia in planning one that I do it infrequently. It really is a big hassle.

If I didn't have paid vacation days, I doubt that I'd ever take one. They'd simply be way too expensive. It's one thing to use paid vacation days, another thing entirely to give up over a week's worth of income. I don't think I could do it.

Re: Never accept a counter-offer

#280

Post by udev »

I don't know what triggered the author to write this, possibly a personal experience.

But whatever it was, he seems convinced that he has seen the light, and even distilled the message to "Never accept a counter-offer", which is nothing but a loud, attention grabbing, media-optimized title, but also, ultimately too-general-to-be-useful type of advice.

The text itself is lacking useful information, maybe with the exceptions of the link to the surveys.

As I get older I observe how smart people tend to put in a large amount of work before they feel ready to disseminate their carefully created, validated, humble in scope, and very often valuable message.

This is the opposite of that.

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