Is this your experience, Andys, are you speculating, or is this just a joke?
This has never happened to me or anyone I know. Loyalty doesn't mean shit anymore and everyone knows it.
On the other hand, my experience has shown that having the balls to stand up for yourself and do whatever you have to do earns new respect.
Phase III (what really happens)
Boss treats you better than ever before.- company scrambles to come up with a good counteroffer, with more money and a transfer onto a more exciting project.
- company decides it needs to lay people off
- "more exiting project" manager sees some new guy on his roster, making more than everybody else. Seems like a safe choice for the axe.
So in a few months, you can go from having two really good offers to being on unemployment and having your best possible alternative being a company that you've left hanging.
The rule in situations like this is to always go to the new company. You can play offers off each other if you like, but the risk of staying put is just not worth it.
When you go through the hiring process at a company to the point where they make you an offer, then give the impression that the only reason you put them through it all was to get yourself a raise at your current job, you piss a bunch of people off, and likely burn that bridge forever.
Finally, having made it in the door at company 2, you now have a bunch of new contacts that will be valuable next time you're on the market. And if that next time is only a couple months in the future, you'll have at least a couple people who were your advocates and now feel they owe you something for convincing you to leave a perfectly good job for whatever dysfunctional office politics caused you not to "fit in" at the new place.
See http://www.thedailyrecruiter.com/the-daily-recruiter-blog/co... for some sobering statistics.
It isn't about loyalty, its about trust. Once you've quit and then flip-flopped once, the boss can't really trust you not to do it again and again. The boss wants stability.