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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

From the other side, whenever a member of my team has come to me asking to match an offer I've always refused and wished them well in their new role.

If someone is unhappy enough to start job hunting rather than talking to me then it's a clear sign that they'll leave soon regardless of any pay rise. Psychologically, every pay increase makes someone happy for a short time, and then they get used to it and they start to wonder if they should have asked for more, or they focus on other reasons why they don't like the role they're in and wonder if the other one would have been more fulfilling. If you match an offer, or even beat it, the person is likely to have left in a year anyway.

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Look at it from this point of view; if your employer is so unhappy with you that, even when you’ve shown your skill, he’s unwilling to pay you a competitive amount then it’s clear you don’t really have a future at your current job.

A new company is willing to risk it on you, while paying more than your current job where you have experience. No surprise they leave in a year anyway.

if your employer is so unhappy with you that, even when you’ve shown your skill, he’s unwilling to pay you a competitive amount then it’s clear you don’t really have a future at your current job

This is the crux of the problem - people assume that anyone going to their boss asking for a raise is underpaid. That isn't always true.

When someone goes and finds a new role on more money it's almost always at a higher level. People move upwards when they move on. Matching an offer usually means paying someone the salary for the higher level role to do the work of the lower level role.

If someone wants to move up a level to earn more I've always been happy to talk to them about that. That's not what we're talking about here though.

I disagree with that. If you go into somewhere as a senior for example, it is not unheard of that a year later you can make a lateral move for 20%+ payrises. I've seen it happen many times in my career (obvious caveat that anecdote != data).

If they got promoted at their new company then you can counter offer with a promotion too?

If I think some has reached the next level then I'll promote them anyway. No one should need to prove that they deserve a promotion by finding another company willing to offer them that role.

You’re taking a lot of flak for this so I’ll try and back you up a bit.

Not all workers are equivalent, and not all roles that seem the same even in the same team, actually are. Let’s say we have a team of 10 people, each with slightly different experience and skills. One of them finds another job with higher pay and asks for it to be matched. What do you do?

It’s quite possible this other role actually matches their skills better than the one with you does. Maybe they are actually worth more to this other company than they are to you. Maybe they had other reasons for looking for a job aside from pay, maybe they’re tired of the job or want a fresh challenge. Maybe it’s a combination of all sorts of factors. Pay is only one.

If you do increase their salary, what about the rest of the team, do you pay them more too? Do they all have the attributes this other company valued in the person they made the offer to? Would they have all got the same offer? Probably not, but now you’ve upped the going rate for a member of your team. They will want the same.

It’s just a really messy situation to get into. If staff retention and recruitment is a problem or you don’t want it to become a problem then sure, of course you should make sure your compensation rates are fair. Of course under paying your team will cause problems. But one person getting one job offer doesn’t necessarily mean anything, except for them.

You're starting from the false assumption that everyone on the team is paid the same.

It's not like everyone performs at the same level or gets the same pay in almost any team I've seen.

If someone gets a job offer, you should consider it a new data point. Some teams don't aim to retain top talent and if that's the case absolutely encourage them to move on. But if you want a high-performing team, you need to pay top of market and a job offer is new signal about the market price.

> Probably not, but now you’ve upped the going rate for a member of your team. They will want the same.

I have never once wanted to be paid the same as everyone on my team. Some people are more experienced than me and should be paid more. Others are less skilled and should be paid less.

> You're starting from the false assumption that everyone on the team is paid the same.

It doesn’t matter. Even if they are different, one person getting a raise changes the relative dynamic. Maybe I was being paid more than this team member and now we’re the same, and maybe I still think I’m worth more. It elevates the basis of comparison.

Also, to expand on my post, it creates the impression in the team that the way to get a raise is to get a competing offer. It says that person was being under paid. Maybe that means you are too? It’s just bad all round.

> If someone is unhappy enough to start job hunting

What makes you think people only go job hunting when they're unhappy? I consider it a moral obligation to seek out the best pay (after staying at a job long enough to justify my original hire and for the sake of my own resume) in order to do my small part to increase worker wages.

Nice trick to keep all the leftover washed-up people who would never dream of anything bigger and probably don't have the skills for it...

That's certainly one way to look at it. Another is that people who work on my team build the skills and confidence that enables them to move up in their careers, and at some point they outgrow what I can offer. I'm usually quite happy that they've been able to do that.

If someone has a chance to take another step up in their career that's a good thing. If I offer them more money to stay at the same level they'd be silly to accept that.

Let me ask you this from a different perspective. If you are responsible for purchasing, will you ask competitors for quotes? And use those quotes for negotiating your current contract with a supplier? Isn't what the employee is doing exactly the same thing?

If you would be a supplier you stance would translate to, I never make a new offer if a customer comes with a better offer from a competitor. I suspect one would loose a lot of customers this way.

Goods don't have a mind and thoughts so psychology does not apply. The good you price-compare won't become unhappy and later leave as OP described.

I have no opinion on if the negotiating tactic is good or not, only that the comparison of goods and people isn't quite right IMO.

We are talking contracts, not goods. Contracts are with companies which are made up of people. So why wouldn't psychology apply?

Edit: I also find the argument that employment is not a an economic transaction a really weird argument. Employers don't give raises just so that the employee feels better for example.

> We are talking contracts, not goods.

The OP talked about people, then your reply was about goods. Unless "contract with a supplier" was about humans as goods, that term obviously means purchasing stuff, not purchasing humans. Who uses "purchasing" when it's about humans/employees?

Goods don't have a brain and no state of mind which was at the center of the OP's comment.

Okay, back to your original reply then:

> If you are responsible for purchasing, will you ask competitors for quotes?

The OP talked about the people themselves. If we follow your line then you don't talk about the employee at all any more. You are talking about something else than the OP.

>If someone is unhappy enough to start job hunting rather than talking to me then it's a clear sign that they'll leave soon regardless of any pay rise.

so you mean if a recruiter contacts your workers and says we can offer you X amount and they check it out they should have talked to you beforehand?

>"If someone is unhappy enough to start job hunting rather than talking to me then it's a clear sign that they'll leave soon regardless of any pay rise."

Long time ago when I was employed I liked my job but felt that I am being paid less than what I could get. So I went searching and after a while got a really nice offer. With that offer I came to the company owner and ask him to give me a reason why should not I take the offer. He did give me a reason - matched the offer and put bonus on top. The end result - I stayed. Well until I went on my own and never looked back.

I’m not sure why this is getting so much negative attention. I’ve been both in and around high level management in the Danish public sector for decades and I’ve never matched or sparred with another manager who would these sort of things.

No one, and I do mean no one, is irreplaceable. Maybe you’ll have to throw away an entire IT system because you’ve lost the know how to keep the business case for the system a net positive, but that means a lot less to an organisation (especially enterprise) that we tend to fool ourselves into believing myself included.

I’m guessing Denmark and the public sector is very different than other countries and industries.

When a key contributor asks for a 20% raise (or say $50,000 more per year) and them leaving put millions of dollars of revenue at risk, or more importantly, reflects poorly on a manager and threatens their advancement (why can’t you keep your team happy?) then the math is actually quite simple.

But in a highly siloed and compartmentalized organization where blame for bad decisions never filters down to the ones making them I could see your point.

them leaving put millions of dollars of revenue at risk

Every team should fight against this. Writing simple, understandable, documented code that doesn't need some key person to maintain it is a very good thing. For a start, failing to do that locks people in to their job. Not being able to move on, and up, is a very bad thing. Secondly, people leave for reasons other than money. What if someone's husband gets a cool job in another state and they move for that? No amount of money would keep them, so you still lose those millions. Thirdly, there's the bus factor - what if that person is run over by a bus? How do you keep going?

Paying someone more and more to keep them is only patching the underlying problem that your team isn't resilient enough to catastrophic change. Fix that problem.

I’d question how good your people are if the best of them leaving wouldn’t impact your revenue. It sounds like an assembly line punching widgets, so maybe the work is neither urgent nor requiring dynamic thinking and responding quickly to changing market conditions? In that case I could see it not mattering if someone leaves.

My experience is on teams of 2-3 working towards a product launch that has to happen in 6 months and sure we can always replace someone if they die. The cost of that if not in revenue, but team efficiency, sacrifice of other work, is way more than a few tens of thousands per year.

And of course, everyone is replaceable. But replacing them may cost more than just paying them more, even if it keeps them around for another 6 months.

You have to look at it from a bigger perspective. From your and my perspective changing jobs is a big deal, it only happens a few time in our lives and it has a massive impact. The management perspective is quite different, you’ll get to not only hire but also interview hundreds of not thousands in your career.

If you’re a good manager you’ll want to keep your employees for 5-7 years. This is because you want to help your employees develop their talents and grow their career, and when you do that, they’ll eventually outgrow the role you hired them to do and how far it was possibly to extend it to accommodate their growth. By that point, you kind of want your employees to move on. Maybe to a new position within your own organisation or to a different place. It’s not because you don’t like them or don’t want them to stay, but it’s because good employees tend to outgrow you. A select few people can stay in the same functions their entire lives and never lose enjoyment or motivation, but most of us aren’t like that and you have to keep that in mind when it comes to “pay me more, or I’m leaving” negotiating.

More than that though, you have to see how relying too much on individual employees is actually what is the management mistake in these type of situations. The issue isn’t “why couldn’t you keep x”, it’s “why did you let x become irreplaceable” because any good manager should know better.

Maybe the public sector in Denmark is different than other places, maybe not. I don’t think that it is. What typically happens when you have IT systems that rely too much on an employee is that they leave you and then you end up paying them a lot more money to consult for 6 months until someone else has redesigned the systems to no longer be too dependent on a single person and your former employee finally gets to really move on.

> Maybe you’ll have to throw away an entire IT system because you’ve lost the know how to keep the business case for the system a net positive, but that means a lot less to an organisation (especially enterprise) that we tend to fool ourselves into believing myself included.

You are comparing throwing away an entire IT system to increasing the salary of _one_ employee.

Well not exactly. You have to look at it from an organisational perspective, and not from an employee perspective.

If you have systems (and that is any function, also cutting onions in the kitchen) that relies so heavily on one employee that you can not continue to operate them without that person then you have a serious issue.

Because you don’t retain employees, and your goal isn’t to keep them forever either. Even if they are happy and stay for 40 years they will eventually retire and then the system tend to break down anyway, and that’s with planned departure. What if your vital employee gets run over by a truck on the way to work?

So from an organisational perspective, it’s not an entire IT system vs one employee. It’s removing a flawed and dangerous system from your organisation.

Some people will argue that employees who design such systems aren’t worth keeping to begin with. I would agree, if the world was perfect, but it’s not.

And when someone come to you asking for a raise, how often do you give it?

Their peers if they're nice enough will let everyone know "Don't ever show up with an offer or you'll be fired." So it happens rarely if at all.

I don't think accepting that someone is going to leave unless I match an offer is the same as me firing them.

I think skywal_l was asking about an employee asking for a raise without a competing offer.

Practically always, but never just more money for the same work. People dont ask very often because I've been lucky enough to be able to give people decent cost-of-living raises, recognition-of-effort raises, and promotions quite regularly. When someone asks for more money it's pretty much always the first step to a promotion, or at least some sort of additional responsibility that comes with a pay increase.

The irony is that the main reason people get paid more when they change job is because they move up at the same time.

I think the reasonable good-faith assumption in this discussion about inflation is that people are asking for a raise not to make more money but just to keep up with prices. So in reality, they are asking for the same amount of purchasing power.

So giving the same purchasing power for more responsibility would probably not look like a good deal for most (unless responsibility is your thing which is the case for some people).

Sounds like they're better off leaving, if that's your attitude.

Yes that’s probably correct. It may well be the best solution for both.

In a heavily inflationary environment this practice could turn out to be entirely maladaptive. What percentage of inflation year on year will you change your mind at? Do you even have a line?

Interesting, as a manager I encourage my team to apply and bring me other offers. I will even help with some minor prep. If they come to me with a better offer I’ll take it to my leadership and show their worth.

If they fail, they know I cared enough to assist and trust me and are happy for their job. If they succeed they get a raise, but are more likely to stay and work harder knowing they can trust me and can collaborate.

I don’t see the downside in engaging in this manner.

I have a manager with a similar attitude to you and I have to say — thanks for being that way. I don’t even care to go get other offers. I get double-digit raises annually and have an amazing team. As long as this manager is around, I feel happy about my work. You sound just as great! :)

If someone on my team comes to me asking for help getting a new role, either in my team or externally, I've always been very happy to do what I can for them.

But if someone on your team is happy in their role but underpaid 10% compared to the market, you will not?

If someone believes they're underpaid they can talk to me about that without needing to prove it by getting another offer. If they do get another offer it's unlikely that it'll be for exactly the same role, so it doesn't really show they're undervalued anyway.

I honestly believe its unlikely that you have an employee for, say, 5 years, then they come to talk to you without getting any counter-offers because they've gotten an average raise of 2% per year, have developed skills, and have market value of 25% greater than their current salary, and you say "ok, I'll give you a 25% raise."

In other words, unless you can contradict me with a straight face, you're basically just saying you underpay as long as you can get away with it and nothing can stop or change that.

> If someone is unhappy enough to start job hunting

What if salary is the only thing they are unhappy about?

I suppose they'd be best off asking for a raise (easy) than applying for jobs and interviewing (a lot more work).

The leverage of a raise negotiation is another job offer (potential or real).

Depending on the situation, it might make sense to keep them for that extra year. There's a lot of specialist roles where you're really dependent on some particular person and it's nice to have a year to find a replacement.

And implicitly tell all your other employees that they better go searching for new jobs or else they won't get a raise, ever? The result is that going out to do interviews has effectively become part of their job description, because apparently that's what you pay them for.

It's all game theory, in a minefield of unintended consequences. I take the opposite approach: an unspoken but clear attitude of "you know you won't be able to buy me when I excuse myself with a better offer, so better ask yourself now than later how much you actually want to pay me". And no, that certainly does not make me fabously rich (but there actually was a time when it worked much less bad than I would expect, quite amusing in hindsight)

> it's a clear sign that they'll leave soon regardless

The first thing my father told me when I started working was "never accept a counter offer. Don't put in your notice unless you're ready to leave - because even if they give you a counter-offer, they'll start looking for your replacement once they know you're looking."

Sundar stayed and it worked out reasonably well for him and for Google:

https://allthingsd.com/20110108/twitter-courts-googles-sunda...

I expect that my line manager would know if I am happy or unhappy and he would have done something. HonesI think my boss knows that I am looking, but we have a great time, he has the chance to go in my direction: salary, external training or more responsibility or I leave… thats the game.

I understand mot everybody can move up the ladder or get more money, but if as I line manager you can’t provide incentives or growth opportunities I would look at you first. If you don’t know the aspirations of your people and you match this with the strategy and goal of the company, are really made for your role? Every manager should be more like - I know you can leave anytime lets find the best solution for all…

If a employee comes to you asking for more money, how fo you respond? How much do you give? How much have you given in the past?

I’ve tried your approach and it’s usually a token amount or “sorry there isn’t a budget”. When I have an another offer then suddenly they find “flexibility”. But that said, I don’t even ask for more if I’m so unhappy I see myself leaving anyways.

The context here is getting an inflation matching pay adjustment. Matching inflation is not a pay rise, it's 'avoiding a real terms pay cut'.

So, you give an inflation matching pay adjustment automatically?

I've gone back to exactly the same job as I started 20 years ago. Pay has doubled, house prices have increased 3-4 times in my small ex-industrial, high-crime, UK city.

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