Joel Spolsky On Tech Hiring: Beware the Exploding Offer

Certainly in the US in most states, employment is "at will", meaning the company can fire you for pretty much any reason at any time (ignoring protected classes and so on). Likewise, the employee can leave at any time.

If you accept the offer and then renege you've actually fulfilled your contractual obligation.

If the company wants more than that, they need to pay for it. They can lock you up for a period with a golden handshake. They can keep you with golden handcuffs.

You have a misguided view of ethics here. The employment contract exists to give both parties an out.

This reminds me tangentially of the ethics debate around foreclosure. Some smart people realized would do things like:

- deliberately not pay the mortgage to trigger foreclosure as they were underwater and presumably they lived in a "no recourse" state (meaning the bank could take the house and that was the end of it);

- they might do this simply to force a better rate or get the bank to settle on the owed debt at a level where they were no longer underwater.

Some argued it was your ethical responsibility to pay if you can. I disagree. The contract that exists between the lender and the borrower exists to lay out the rights and responsibilities of both parties, including a mechanism for terminating the contract.

From a purely ethical (and completely irrelevant) point of view I see this as holding banks accountable for shady lending practices. After all, it was banks and the lack of due diligence in lending practices that led to this situation.

You are under no obligation to spend several years working for your second or third choice employer just because you said you would.

Think about it this way. Imagine you said to your spouse "I said I'd marry you but that's because someone else said 'no' so I'm going to stick with it because I said I would". What would happen? Would your spouse thank you? Almost certainly not. Nobody wants to be a second choice.

An employer wants people who are excited to be working for them and enthused about what they're working on. It makes a happier employee and a better place to work. If you feel like you're trapped you'll simply mope around thinking about the other chance you gave up, helping nobody, including the employer.

Oh and as for the idea that you've crossed the employer, in my experience most people don't take this personally and, for those that do, you probably don't want to work for them anyway. Fact is, they'll probably forget who you are in a few days or less.

It might hurt your chances at working for that same company in the future but it probably won't. And if it does, considering you turned them down once, do you really want to work for them?

If you accept multiple job offers with the intention of waiting for the best possible offer, you are actively lying to the other companies. Sure, it might be im(ex?)plicitly allowed by the contracts you sign, but that doesn't change the fact that you are acting unethically.

I've been in this situation before and what's worked for me is to play the same game they do. If they tell you that they need an answer by a certain date, you tell them you're very interested in their offer, but you have already setup other interviews that you want to see through, because it's the right thing to do. Leave it at that.

Don't try and get the date changed, just be non-committal, and tell them you'll do your best. Job offers are very rarely yanked because you didn't met the first deadline for an offer.

When they call you 2 days before the deadline and ask if you have an answer, tell them you need "X" amount of time and then you'll give them a decision. Don't say "Can I have two more weeks", say "If you can wait until Jan 15th, I will give you an answer then". Recruiters have been jerked around before and if you provide your own deadline (and hold yourself to it) they'll often go along with it.

RF

You're mixing things up. Ethically speaking, if the company winds up having _cause_ to fire them later, that's a separate matter, and there's no ethic quandary.

Likewise, if the employee makes an effort to work there and decides to leave, there is no ethical issue.

If a company must engage in layoffs, a responsible company incorporates a severance as a means compensating the employee for the failure of the company to hold to their end of the bargain due to unforeseen circumstances or failure.

> If you accept the offer and then renege you've actually fulfilled your contractual obligation. If the company wants more than that, they need to pay for it.

One shouldn't have to pay for people to do what they say they'll do: if they accept the offer, barring some act of god, they should start work for the company.

You bring up mortgages as an example -- it's a poor one. In buying a house, you're stating the intention to pay for it. Ethically, you're on the hook -- if you fail to make payments, someone else will be left holding the bag.

The contract is merely a legal (not ethical) enforcement mechanism by which the bank may attempt to recoup their loss, in a country where we (rightly) have the 13th amendment that forbids slavery and/or debtors prisons.

> From a purely ethical (and completely irrelevant) point of view I see this as holding banks accountable for shady lending practices. After all, it was banks and the lack of due diligence in lending practices that led to this situation.

The bank is ethically culpable for shady lending practices, but _so are the people who accepted shady mortgages_.

What's more, is that those people drove up housing prices and made it that much harder for responsible buyers to own a home.