Ask HN: Worst experience receiving an offer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Worst experience receiving an offer?

46 pointstreyfitty67 comments

I just went through a month from receiving a verbal offer, to offer on paper. In between, they reduced the offer twice, and the offer on paper was 15% lower than the prior verbal offer. At no point did I negotiate. I was going to negotiate once they got their stuff together on paper. Now that I received the formal offer, I felt like I had to walk away with dignity and just declined.

It was with a mid-tier cryptocurrency exchange. I knew their culture was terrible since the NYT recently covered them, so I can’t say I was surprised.

It appears the balance of power has shifted back to employers.

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Just after my daughter was born, I tried to use some of my time off to go interview for a new job. Not "recieveing an offer" as such but attempting to realize a couple of standing offers: "if you ever get tired of working there we have a place for you here."

We're in TN and I need to go have face to face meetings with people in New Mexico and Utah. And can't let my boss know: which I failed at.

Drove out and discovered that my boss had heard that I was looking for other employment, he called ahead to the folks I had lined up interviews with (and several others) and spun them a story that had them refuse to meet me and had the police come check out whatever it was they'd heard 3rd or 4th hand.

5,000 mile road trip, there and back again. In 5 days. Didn't find out the whole story for a couple years. At least I got to drive past the VLA radio telescope.

That's terrible. Hope things worked out for you after that.

I hope you quit your job after that? No way I could keep working for someone after they did that.

Very shortly thereafter, yes. I was vital to the business but they didn't know that, so I spent a few months longer than I should have trying to keep them from blowing up. Totally foolish and futile in hindsight.

I'd like to tell the whole story, but i can only get little bits out with more humor than bitterness.

How did your boss know your interview targets, much less the contact points? Unless you told someone, no employer would reference check you before you even came to interview. This sounds a bit loose.

Edit: if it’s true, go to HR and get that person immediately fired.

No HR, 15 years ago, too.

This was a small circle of specialist publishers that commonly worked together. There weren't but a dozen or so people on his list; mine was 6, 3 of which I was going to see on that trip.

If anyone ever calls me up to tell me the person that is going to interview at my company is a bad apple, I’d see that as a huge red flag for the boss.

This.

I'd have half a mind to call their boss and let them know... but I'd just be making the whole thing worse.

Just let the applicant know...

If it's about an ex-employee it's at least _possible_ that they're actually trying to help you, but it doesn't even make sense for a current employee. You want to warn me that this person is so awful that I shouldn't even consider hiring them, but you haven't fired them yourself or you aren't happy about the person you hate but can't fire for some reason choosing to leave on their own?

Sounds like an easy case to win.

sounds like what your boss did might have been illegal

I felt really bad about your experience. Nobody should be treated that way. I also felt envious that you had seen the VLA. I've always wanted to see it but never got around to it. But mostly, I admire that you are able to see the good things while bad things happen. Most of us are not able to do that and miss all the good things that happen around us while we go through the bad experiences of life.

> "if you ever get tired of working there we have a place for you here."

I highly doubt this is an actual option for employers in 2022. In their mind, they have a seat and need someone to fill it.

I once interviewed with a crypto exchange and after getting the offer I noticed it was for contract and not full-time as had initially been offered. I went back to them and said I had a similar compensation offer for full-time from another company and if they wanted me to consider contract with them then they would have to raise the offer. Their response was an offer to pay me directly in bitcoin.

Lmao. This is next level BS. How can we take crypto seriously when they pull stuff like this?

> cryptocurrency exchange

Exactly what you’d expect from a company specializing in pixie dust.

> It appears the balance of power has shifted back to employers.

I respectfully disagree. Try getting a job at a more traditional organization, like a good old bank, if you’re interested in finance.

Lol. I’m at a bank right now. My experience is exclusively in financial services

Uber once offered me a job. Except they didn't. The recruiter kept saying "we'll put it in writing as soon as you commit to accepting."

I had told them I was weighing their offer against a different one. In fact I slightly preferred their situation.

After several rounds of this ridiculous dance, I finally realized I didn't want to work for a company that acted with so little decency.

I've no doubt that wasn't the case everywhere at Uber, but it was a bad experience.

I would probably reply with a verbal commitment just to see the offer, get their hopes up (employers are excited to finally land a new hire!), then reject once I had the offer (unless it was a godfather offer). Congrats to you for taking the high ground!

In all fairness sometimes it’s a huge pain in the ass depending on how HR set up the req 2 offer process (even worse if a ERP is involved), and having some vague notion on if you’d accept would help.

Plus as a hiring manager, and this is minor, I’d feel kinda embarrassed if out of sheer statistical luck multiple candidates turned down written offers, which would indicate maybe something is wrong with us as a hiring entity.

Not sure there’s a playbook here. Another commenter suggested being untruthful and pulling the offer out of them. Given how many times companies screw over employees that might be the game theory rational thing to do here even though it’s not great ethically.

Just my 2 cents.

> In all fairness...

Isn't this your fault (your company's fault) for creating such a silly process? It's not the candidate's fault that writing an offer is difficult. Still not the candidate's fault that you've got some poorly thought out metrics that make you withhold a written offer.

Fair, fair, and fair. :)

Or don't reject it but merely ghost them. Or tell them you'll start on a date and don't bother showing up.

No need to sink to their level. At the same time, I get it; sweet justice.

It would certainly have been easy to do. In a weird way, it felt almost like a transparent test of my willingness to lie - or at least, to not keep my word.

Like everyone else, I change my mind about things frequently, and have to back away from things I've said. But it feels very different when you know up front that there's a good chance you won't do what you've just said you'll do. I really dislike that feeling.

All 3 of my employers in the past said this as well (“we don’t draft letters without a verbal accept, as a matter of policy”). I thought it was weird but didn’t let that dissuade me, purely because they were the only offers at each time. Why do companies do this? What benefit does this afford them or what risks does it mitigate for them? I never understood it.

Why not just verbally accept then? They have some red tape to get the contract written up. Then if on paper the offer is crap you can still say no.

We did this a bit at a previous workplace. Essentially sending out a formal offer letter involved a lot of HR, approval meetings and exec sign offs. If the person wasn't interested there was no point in going to the effort.

Just corporate procedure and trying to save busy-work.

this makes plenty of sense to me. It certainly wasn't my goal to make extra work for them, and I value efficiency!

At the same time, the other company was willing to do that extra work upfront, which made me feel like they actually wanted me to come.

I think I might've felt a little differently about it had the recruiter been transparent and said something about the work involved. Then again, at the end of the day, we had all done quite a lot of work to get to that point. Not being willing to do the final steps suggests (to me) a lack of commitment to the offer.

This is done partly to prevent people from using written offers as leverage to either negotiate a higher compensation at their current job or another company they are interviewing with.

If I verbally accept an offer that was never put in writing, I feel like one of three things could happen:

1: there is something materially and surprisingly bad in the contract (equity or cash isn't as described)

2: there is something that is arguably not material, but which is surprisingly bad in the contract (something to do with vesting schedule, clawback of a 'signing bonus')

3: everything is as-expected.

In case 1, it's clear that they have materially changed the terms, and I am no longer bound by my verbal acceptance (which was of a different offer).

In case 2, they can argue that what was changed isn't material, and so I'm still bound. But if they say that, I would reply that if it's not material, then they should have no problem changing it back to the originally-discussed state. If they don't, I walk. It's not like they can force you to work for them, and they would presumably not try to ruin your rep over it because you could probably do more damage to them (by posting on HN, for example).

In case 3, obviously everything is fine!

Because they operate on KPI's and if they get 1 too many rejected offers, they lose their bonus/go to the front of the line to be axed.

Always be suspect of what people say verbally, vs what they are willing to put into writing.

This is every company I’ve known. It’s a pain to do the write up and mostly just used to shop around.

I'm sorry this happened to you, that is some bullshit. As said by others, you are better off.

One time I was offered a high-level architect position at a technical consulting firm, and they proceeded to make me a job offer. I gave verbal acceptance, then the next day they came back and said they still wanted me but with a lower title and compensation.

I was still young and naive, and was quite surprised and then really didn't respond well (super offended). That was the end of that.

Dodged a bullet, getting pimped out by a consulting firm and working on projects without any ownership isn't my cup of tea anyway. Some people are truly Thoughtless.

They used to be solid before, they changed owners, maybe that influenced. I worked with them years ago and it was good, then recently and kind of didn't like it as they were snobby and didn't really deliver much.

I once interviewed at a startup. They asked all kinds of questions, technical and other, which was fine. They made me an offer, which I accepted. Then, I received the following:

"About your offer, here at XXX we have the practice of doing an induction test before signing any contracts with any new hires."

This was the first time I had heard about this. It would have been fine if they did the induction test before they made the offer, but I had never heard of it being done after an offer. I told them:

"I was very surprised to get this message. I thought I had already gone through all the technical screening steps during the interview process. To be told that I have to go through another screening step, even after you verbally made me an offer and had me fill in all the paperwork, is simply not professional.

I'm inclined to say let's call the whole thing off. It isn't clear that you really want me to work for you. Can you convince me that this isn't true?"

Needless to say, I didn't go work for them.

How did they respond?

The worst I've heard is what only recently happened to NSW public servant Jenny West. She went for a role as a trade commissioner to NY for the Australian NSW state government.

She apparently met all the requirements, completely convincing them to hire her as she had bucketloads of experience in the private and public sector. They actually told her that she had the job, so she immediately started to arrange things for a move.

Two weeks later, her boss in Investments NSW, Amy Brown, told her that the position had been rescinded as it was a "cabinet process" - which it never turned out to be - and it was given to the former politician who created the original roles in the first place!

Eventually, it came out that Amy Brown told her it was a "gift" for someone else.

On top of this she was not able to return to her job as deputy secretary of Investment NSW - West had been made redundant!

Right now there are serious claims of corruption. It blew up in the politician's faces and John Barilaro who got the job over West was forced to resign from the position.

I honestly don't feel like these things are about a balance of power, although sometimes they are. I feel like a lot of this is more about how they value you. Are you easily forgotten for whatever fire is there? Is it a form letter? Do they call you a week before you start and ask if you want to have lunch and if you're settling in? I've had all these happen - and they almost always point to the internal culture of the place.

In terms of money offers, I had one place that I interviewed for, and I nailed it. Like, really nailed it, walked out of the startup and they literally said they will work on an offer right away. They offered me $10k less a year than I was asking. After a weekend of not responding, they upped the offer to what I asked for. I didn't go there, and I don't regret it in the slightest. I don't want to be the cost you pinch. (And no, I wasn't even asking for a raise to go there)

The oh-so-bubbly recruiter for a company I interviewed at for a senior Go position completely ghosted me afterwards, not even responding to the promised reimbursement for my travel expenses for the interview (it was a few hours drive and a cheap hotel, so not excessive). The recruiter then contacted me, by mistake obviously, with a "how was your first day" email a couple of months later, and still didn't respond to my reply. Several months later the company called and asked if I was still interested in the job. I paused and finally said I'd consider it if someone would simply respond to my original request for the travel reimbursement. Never heard from them again. I guess I never got to the offer stage, but that whole affair sure was irritating.

This is the type of egregious behaviour where you should really name the company.

I agree. The lack of naming-and-shaming in these threads makes the anecdotes worthless except for commiseration purposes. When will these companies be held accountable? Only when people find courage.

Any employer who reduces an offer is a huge red flag and is presumptively a moron. You dodged a bullet. You should have ceased communication when the offer was "reduced" in the first place!

Maybe the balance of power is shifting back to employers, but it's still premature to act on that assumption. Plenty of room to negotiate and get good jobs.

> ... I felt like I had to walk away with dignity and just declined.

You dodged a bullet. Whatever company this is appears to be circling the drain. The problem you'll face now is: how many other companies are in the same position?

They are in a desperate situation. When you walked, the balance of power was on your side.

I've never had a truly terrible experience at the offer stage, but I do have one sort of dodgy story.

Interviewed at a startup, it was small but had just landed a VERY large customer in addition to series B so they were going nuts with the hiring. I daresay I did well during the interview and within a week we'd moved onto discussing salary etc.

Now for the non-Australian readers here superannuation is your mandatory retirement savings/investment fund. Your employer has to pay you a minimum % of your salary on top of your actual salary to your super fund and you can't touch it until a certain age. In 99.99% of cases employment contracts here will state your salary PLUS super so they'll say something like "$100,000 plus superannuation of x% paid fortnightly/monthly/whatever".

Back to the offer;

We agreed upon a figure, lets say it was $100k + options + superannuation (I have no memory, this was many years ago) - notice all the plusses here everything we talked about was IN ADDITION TO the base salary. A few days pass and I've heard nothing so I flick an email to the hiring manager, and still hear nothing back. A few more days pass and out of the blue I get a Docusign request containing my contract, yay!

Being young at the time I was just going to sign it immediately but I had a feeling in the back of my mind that I should double check, and sure enough they were trying to screw me over. The remuneration section read "$100,000 inclusive of superannuation and stock options value at $SomeAmount". They were trying to short change me somewhere in the ballpark of $30k by their own estimates. I called the hiring manager and of course he tried to pretend this was what we had discussed all along (it wasn't, because no one in Australia does that) so I told them to go jump.

Turns out I dodged a bullet - their one large customer sued them (quite publicly at the time), and Accenture or someone similar swooped in after that fact and bought the survivors for pennies on the dollar, and then fired everyone.

first time this happened to me, I assumed it was my mistake, and took the hit because the salary was a big jump anyway. turned out to be a great job so I'm glad I didn't let this significant error stand in my way.

but the experience meant that since then I've been -very- careful and deliberate to repeatedly confirm that superannuation is additional. Nonetheless, twice I've got the paperwork saying otherwise. I'm now convinced its a standardised scam.

Once interviewed for a US government lab. Job sounded cool, it involved HPC and large weather simulations. Interviews went great and they decided to extend an offer. Then almost 2 months of silence. I had moved on but they miraculously got back to me after all that time. They sent me an “offer” by… text message, I kid you not. The “offer” included the salary number and that was it. I was expecting the text message to just be a very unorthodox way to give me a preview, but no, that was it. I had to ask for a formal offer letter, almost felt like a scam. Needless to say, I passed.

Had 10% superannuation disappear, and they wanted me to sign off conditional on passing checks. They pushed back when I said the checks will happen before I sign. They also wanted 3 months notice.

I don't know what they were thinking. Their offer wasn't so good to make such demands. I don't know why they demand 3 months notice, yet were unwilling to wait for me to be fully checked before I signed and gave notice.

Also, their checks requires facial recognition to a third party. They claimed my data would be safe, but it's an incredibly shitty thing to do to an employee.

I once worked with a recruiting agency to apply to a publicly-traded company that they were engaged with. I told them the TC that I'd need to make a move and they said that the company in question could definitely hit it. I went through the interview rounds and did well enough but wasn't particularly enthused about the prospective job. Just before they extended me a verbal offer the recruiter called me and said that they'd seen them extend offers that were almost double what my initial ask was; I was on the fence about the job but if they were ponying up those kinds of dollars then I'd be obligated to at least consider their offer.

Instead they massively low-balled me with a lower base than what I was making at the time plus ~30% of the RSUs that they'd need to hit my number. I asked the recruiter and the company both about this and they said that the value of the RSUs was predicated on "their growth potential" and that I had to account for their future value. I double-checked with the recruiter to make sure that there wasn't a miscommunication and they confirmed that the company knew what my requirement was.

Needless to say this made my decision fairly simple. Their share price was in the toilet and I'd never worked for a company that granted RSUs before so maybe they thought that they'd be able to pull a fast one on me, but it was a colossal waste of everybody's time regardless.

That reminds me of a time a recruiter started browbeating me over rejecting an offer which was the exact same or less TC as my current job (where I was happy). I had to hang up on him and never responded to to the subsequent urgent calls and emails.

A few years later he had the audacity to email me once again trying to "work with me" insisting the past was all "water under the bridge". What a pushy, selfish fool.

“Growth potential” lol.

Yeah guys that’s why you’re not paying 100% cash and getting years of liquidity being withheld to your advantage. Tell you what - pay all cash and I can invest it in the stock market myself in the meantime.

Plus they don’t all work out.

It’s in the employers best interest a lot of the time, not the employees.

Went through a very rushed process at Google. Got a verbal thumbs up. Was invited to come in and meet a member from my future team for lunch. Was told written offer was incoming in a week. Was called 2 days later and told the committee rejected my packet. Zero feedback. Was randomly invited to interview for another role a week later which I thought was audacious. It killed any desire I had to work there.

Wow. That’s terrible. How long did it take for you to recover from that experience? My current situation has me so cynical that I’m withdrawing from all my interviews… it’s such a daunting process that I don’t want to go through all this multiple times

I had another job lined up so that was a decent consolation prize, but I've never thought of Google the same way after that.

I once interviewed for a startup during its "hyperspeed growth" period (can't remember what specific jargon they used but it was something like that). Got a good offer, handed in my notice, then the recruiter called again and said the offer was actually about 10% lower. I was a bit put out but I was relatively inexperienced in this negotiation stuff so accepted it. Then when the first day came, I was put into a team entirely different from the one I applied for - I applied for a Python ML engineering position, got put into a Java data engineering team. Naively I accepted this, hated it, managed to change teams (after ~4 months) to something more like my expertise, but eventually left the company because the management culture was generally toxic.

First impressions may not be everything, but I wish I'd gone with my gut on that one.

You did the right thing. The one and only time it took a week for me to go from verbal to written offer (with poor / spotty communication in between) was, as expected, a dumpster fire when I finally joined.

If they can't get their act together for interviewing and hiring, they're going to have a much harder time attracting talented engineers and probably have serious management problems internally. You dodged a bullet.

> It appears the balance of power has shifted back to employers

As a counterpoint, I haven't experienced any decreased demand and am still having an easy time interviewing for what I want. I think some of the discourse around this is employers wanting to scare devs into taking lower comp, similar to how a number of very profitable companies immediately and significantly raised prices in response to inflation discourse.

Similarly to others here, I turned down an offer after they reduced it by 10% apropos of nothing, no negotiation, nothing. Red flag, if they’re like that so early on what are they going to be like 6 months into the hire.

I received an offer after a reasonably basic old-school interview process. The contract included a large block of unlawful stuff, such as me being on the hook for their insurance excess if the company car was damaged, regardless of fault. When I indicated that I was unwilling to sign the contract with the unlawful inclusions they ghosted me.

I saw that same job advertised for a couple of years at roughly 3-6 month intervals.

> I felt like I had to walk away with dignity and just declined.

You did them a favor by doing so. They didn't do you any favors? I would have ghosted such a company.

The worst experience I had was to have an offer get retracted before I could make my decision. I'm not so bitter about it to name them but I'll never work for that company, that's for sure.

Just out of university, Intel offered me a job, pending a cursory background check & I would have been getting the onboarding details. Since all the hoops were checked, I declined other pending offers and negotiations.

They declined it at the last minute citing internal replacement.

That seems like the kind of company that is updating its hiring managers with reduced budgets on a weekly basis. That is not the kind of company that would have been able to employ you for long anyway!

Flakes gonna flake. Chiselers gonna chisel. It may not be "balance of power", just... people do what they are. At least they told you who they are, and you believed them.

"When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time."

As someone who's been recently waved some promise of sponsorship for my open source project (self hosted payment gateway for crypto currencies), mind if you share the name?

(This just happened last week)

Name & Shame: Storm two dot com recruitment

I recently interviewed with a startup. The tech and mission aligned great with my interests. I interviewed with them and it was a beautiful fit. I was super happy. The recruiter (call him R) worked for a recruitment company (not part of the startup I was applying for) and seemed like a good guy.

Then the offer came in. R got on a call with me to discuss and dialed in his manager/VP? (call him S for Seb because that's his name).

Shit turned ugly so fast. While the offer was good for a startup it was still less (-25%) TC than I currently make. I was still completing interviews and this offer was the first on the table. So I wanted some more time to decide. The offer itself even had a clause that it was valid for 10 days.

S got abrasive and downright hostile and aggressive. He acted like he'd never heard of someone taking time to consider an offer. He then pulled out *every* shady used-car-salesman manipulation trick in the book. It's like he was going for a blackout BINGO card:

- changing negotiators: the fact that he joined the call at all was a tactic

- negged me: acted like I wasn't "that senior" and the company was taking a risk on me

- illusory time-crunch: they need to fill this role "NOW" and can't wait another week

- anger projection-deflection: he acted like I was the one being aggressive as soon as he started being aggressive

- "spirit of the offer" vs "letter of the offer": acted like taking the offer verbiage literally (the 10-day expiry period on the offer) was somehow wrong. This is the part I absolutely hate the most about these offer negotiations. They want you to accept them "on faith" but that's LITERALLY not how written contracts work. Top-tier scumbag negotiation tactics.

- Acting like I was the one to suddenly start lying or changing my mind: I'd been very clear from the beginning that I was going to take time to consider offers.

My wife was next to me while I was on that call and it took us all evening to "come down" from how heated it was. We'd dealt with car salesmen and had bought a house together. We were no strangers to intense negotiations but this was nothing like anything we'd ever dealt with.

R texted me later with a semi-apology on behalf of S, but S never did the same.

On the next call with R, it was glaringly obvious that S was on the call but muted. R's responses were delayed by several seconds and you could tell he was getting advice on another line.

Thereafter R texted or called me nearly every day for the next week. Now he started adopting S's tactics:

- Reminded me that other companies might go with other candidates (yeah, no shit, that's how this all works)

- Claiming that taking the offer would help *my* "mental health and financial stability" WTF? The offer was literally less money than I currently make. It practically came through as a threat.

Again, R & Seb belonged to a recruitment company that I would probably never interact with again if I took the offer, but holy shit had they completely soured the deal.

I'm still deliberating on whether I should let the startup know what happened because I don't think they ever got my side of the story. Seb probably just told them I ghosted him and was "playing games" or something.

I got an email asking if I would be okay with $2 less after we agreed on an hourly rate over the phone.

I didn’t respond and moved on.

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