Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

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This makes no sense to me. The initial environment of using counter-offers as a substitute to raises is, of course, crazy and must be avoided. But never making counter-offers is also dogmatic and crazy. When something is bad, the answer isn't to do the opposite. Maybe 90% of the time, doing the exact opposite is also bad.

It only seems right to me that counter-offers should be made when the situation warrants, and that they should in no way be made to substitute for proper compensation and raises in the first place.

Ideally, you never have to make counter-offers, because you pay your people properly. But mistakes will be made. If a really good employee gets a job offer with a better salary, and suddenly you realize that this guy is worth it, why not make a counter offer, if you think he's honest and isn't going to just leave three months later anyway? If the situation warrants it, do it. Take the situation as a sign that you screwed something up, but that's no reason to not even bother to try to fix it. Likewise, if a guy gets another offer and he's clearly not worth it, wish him well and let him go. Don't be dogmatic.

Why did you not realize that “this guy is worth it” until he already has one foot out the door?

If his only reason for being dissatisfied with his current job was the money, why didn’t he just go to his manager and say “hello, I was looking at salary surveys and other information about the job market, and reviewing all the ways that I have made money for you guys over the past year, and I think I deserve such-and-such more than I’m getting right now”? Why is he finding staying in the familiar environment of your company less attractive than job-hunting in his spare time, possibly even burning vacation time for interviews, and then going out to work with a bunch of strangers?

Not everyone knows their worth and some people avoid confrontation (you are confronting your boss in a way). Some managers might overlook some people (not saying they are good/bad at managing if they do).

I had the experience of being underpaid (while I was still in school so it wasn't all about the money) but after I graduated I wanted to make at least close to what is going around here. I had it pretty lucky that I could just waltz into the boss's office and say I need to make more. It had been over a year and I had graduated in that time frame so I felt I had a bit of an argument and I am the guy who hates confrontation. At that point it was pretty much only about the money as almost everything else I did like.

> Why did you not realize that “this guy is worth it” until he already has one foot out the door?

There are plenty of reasons this could happen. It's a mistake, and you should analyze the situation to see why it was made. But that doesn't imply you should let people walk out the door just because you made a mistake.

You assume that anyone who comes up with this thing implies a particular scenario, when it really doesn't. It could simply be that e.g. an employee got a cold call from some friends who recently got some funding and is toying with the idea of switching jobs, and the higher salary is the one thing that really makes him think of taking the offer.

According to my recruiter's stats he told me that 93% of those that accepted counter-offers from their original company were looking for a job again within 6 months. The two scenarios were a) The company extended the counter offer to keep the employee long enough to carry out the contingency plan (i.e. hire someone to take his place and then fire the guy who they couldn't count on to stick around) or b) all the reasons why the guy wanted to quit are still there, except maybe the money one -- and rarely does someone quit solely over money. People will deal with less money if they love getting up and going to work in the morning.

Counteroffers usually fail. The employee is usually in a different company in 12 months, either by getting fired (as soon as a CO is made, the boss is working on a replacement plan) or taking another offer elsewhere. Only if the counteroffer involves a move to another team or up the chain of command does it work.

Money has a surprisingly small effect on employee happiness. Most people who leave do so because they outgrow their role. Giving them more money to do the same stuff isn't going to have a long-term effect.

This happened to me; I was aggressively talked down from an attractive job offer I received, and when I accepted a counter, a succession plan was put in place to improve the the timing of my presumed inevitable resignation.

This isn't folklore. There are roles and companies where counteroffers are pathological; sometimes it's overt and the company is trying to screw you over, and other times it's subtle and emergent and has more to do with the inevitable loss of traction that comes of the company preparing itself more deliberately for your eventual departure.

If I ever end up in this situation again, I'm certainly going to bring this concern up directly and immediately. It's something you can work out if you're negotiating in good faith; it's not the case that there's no such thing as a successful counter.

If your story is any way indicative of SOP, it sounds like a counteroffer should come with an employment contract with time and termination restrictions.

The odds of you ever negotiating something like that from any company with funding and/or house counsel are effectively zero. The closest you'll get is severance, but note that negotiating an effective severance agreement is expensive and can get adversarial. (It's easy to get a severance agreement that does not really protect you).

By this I mean, don't look to contractual provisions to mitigate the risk of a bad-faith (or bad-in-effect) counteroffer. You'll either establish real trust in your employer or you should walk.

either by getting fired (as soon as a CO is made, the boss is working on a replacement plan)

Does this actually happen? Has it happened to you, or have you gotten rid of someone as a manager in this way?

Head of Talent at a few different startups here. I have seen this happen multiple times.

"Head of Talent" sounds pretty third-party HR, sorry. The fact remains is that this kind of conventional wisdom persists without examples.

Thanks for telling me what my job is, but its not third party HR. I am the head of talent at a specific startup and I had been at a different one before that. I hope you made yourself feel better with this bizarre snark out of nowhere though?

Used to work for a Fortune 100 tech company everyone has heard of - and have heard this confirmed from multiple members of first-party HR.

You're under no obligation to believe me, but I've heard this corroborated by people in the know.

So, "friend of a friend" is all we have for this? Hearsay? I'd think that if this was anything more than received wisdom that there would be more concrete stories about it.

Hey, cut it out. Multiple people have now told you they have direct experience with this issue. If you have a real argument against the idea that counteroffers are risky, marshall it.

After you tell me I'm lying about what my job is, you accuse someone else of only relating stories through a friend of a friend, when it is clear thats not whats happening. What is your agenda here? Your disconnection with reality is getting a bit scary...

Huh? The guy is posting from an account with 600 karma; I'm going to assume his experience is at least as reputable as anyone else's here. Though it'd be useful to hear a slightly more specific example with the timescales and nuances on which these things happen, yes.

Not saying anything about the guy's experience (I usually take people at face value when they say what they do), but karma's a pretty shitty measure to judge expertise.

- Signed, the guy with 23,000 karma, who was once #2 on the leaderboard and is still in the top 30.

I think there's a lot more meaning in the difference between 0 and 600 karma, than the difference between 600 and 23,000 karma. I was only speaking to my willingness to believe this guy wasn't flat lying or exaggerating about his position, or simply trolling. But tips hat point taken.

For what its worth, I;m not lying or exaggerating. I can send you my LinkedIn if you'd like and it would be clear I'm not lying. I suppose I could have provided some examples, but I would have been a lot more willing to do so if the guys original response had been "can you give a few examples" versus "hey stranger on the internet, let me accuse you of lying about what your job is, because that seems rational..."

No matter where you are, there is someone who wants your job. Even if your job sucks, there are people out there who don't know that yet.

As soon as your manager gets an inkling that you'd rather be somewhere else or doing a different kind of work, the clock is ticking. No manager wants to waste time or energy on someone who'll move on to greener pastures in half a year.

"as soon as a CO is made, the boss is working on a replacement plan"

I hear what you are saying but you cannot generalize this. One anecdote: my wife successfully got a counter-offer from one of her jobs a few years ago and stayed for a long time afterwards. her company/boss wanted her and did not think of her leaving to get a decent raise as a threat. They understood and obliged.

"Counteroffers usually fail." Which is why I advocate thinking about the situation and only making counter offers when they actually make sense.

I mean, startups usually fail. Does that mean one should never start a startup?

Of course. If you can come up with an intelligent counteroffer with a decent chance of success, then go ahead. It is, however, a failure of management to have had to make one. This may be why employees who take CO's often get fired; their existence is a continuing embarrassment to the manager who failed to promote/raise them until an ultimatum was made.

Which is exactly what I said in my comment. Treat the need for a counter offer as a failure, but don't just rule it out because the situation shouldn't have happened.

Before I was a manager, I believed that taking a counter offer was always stupid. Now that I'm on the other side of the fence, I see that it's not always so cut and dry. I wonder how many of the people supporting the author are actually managers in charge of compensation decisions.

I must be out of the norm.

Every raise have made me happier.

I will welcome every raise with open arms.

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