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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting comment on the Linkedin page:

In my experience, This is actually not that surprising, don’t find yourself cornered by such situations, always get offers more than one and then keep them on their edge until you have joined. Such is corporate life.

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Yeah, that doesn’t match my expectation at all. Does that commenter think that you should always have multiple job offers before giving notice to your current job?

Yes? Isn't the common advice that you should have multiple offers in hand before giving notice? Or do you give notice without an offer?

The middle ground here, and what most people do, is giving notice when you have one (1) offer in hand. You shouldn't need multiple

Do you not negotiate between companies who've given you offers? That's standard advice for tech workers that I've heard and used.

It's unlikely to get several offers being in negotiation at the same time. If you manage to do it it's obviously better, but hard to synchronize.

If you're hoping to negotiate a counter from your current employer maybe you should have multiple, it probably gives you a stronger hand. If you're leaving either way why would you?

And this isn't about 0 offers vs. many, it's 1 offer vs. many.

You'd negotiate between the companies that gave you offers, not between you and your current employer, although you can do that too but it's not recommended, due to them knowing you'll leave.

ok but that's still not really what this is about. Leveraging multiple offers for better pay is a solid strategy for a particular fiscal goal, but it's not something that's advised (that I've ever seen) to avoid the situation described in this post (an accepted offer being revoked).

Nor does it really protect you anyways, if you accept one of those offers and then reject the others after your starting date, but the one you picked lets you go the next day you'll still be in a very weakened negotiating position again when you come back for a do-over on the other offers.

You want to have multiple offers because it helps you leverage yourself to higher pay during negotiations, and it also gives you more choices to decide where to go next.

You want to have a offer before giving notice just so you know what's next, and obviously you shouldn't do this if you don't intend on accepting the only offer you have.

If you have no offers you can quit, but you have no guarantee of finding a job immediately and it also can hurt your leverage while negotiating.

This kinda goes against what OP is against though, no? If you have multiple offer letters, chances are multiple other companies have stopped their job search (especially if they don't want to lead on other candidates).

Not necessarily, sometimes companies will oversubscribe to offers, ie hand out multiple offers but only take one of them, because they know many people could decline so they don't want to be stuck with no one.

Same philosophy on the employee side, not beneficial to ride everything on only one offer.

What companies do you know that do that (besides Tesla, apparently)?

I guess it's time to start insisting that signing bonus doesn't have a 1 year cliff

I've been working for 20 years and I've had 6 different jobs. I have never once had multiple simultaneous offers for new jobs. In my experience it's been offer; acceptance; agree on start date; then give notice.

Interesting. That has not been my experience at all. For every job I'd get multiple simultaneous offers then use them for leverage against each other one, then accept the best one.

Not good advice.

What is good to excellent advice: Have a SIGNED offer letter in hand that you have also accepted before giving notice. That is a MUST (does not matter how good interview etc went).

This is so tone deaf by Tesla though - it's what folks like to chat about so I don't get it. We've made things right in a few cases where for example a part time job ended up more part time than expected. Just pay out at end to true things up etc.

It may have happened to you, or you may have heard of it happening.

Doesn't mean it's even slightly acceptable.

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