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Comment by treyfitty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

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