I feel like the author has severely overreacted here.
Counteroffers are a fact of daily life with most corporations, there's nothing malicious nor personal about them. A ludicrous counter-offer means the company has severe managerial issues and has allowed someone to become absolutely, non-negotiably indispensable.
IMO perceiving the counteroffer as "buying off his dreams" is a huge overreaction, and in my various jobs has never been a malicious move. Your boss is trying to save his bacon, not destroy your dreams.
The author does nail one point, but for the wrong reasons:
> "So some of these offers are just plain “keep them in the building while we find a replacement who’ll do the job at the price we were paying.”"
That's exactly what these counteroffers are. Very few counteroffers are serious counteroffers (serious as in they will keep you on indefinitely at the new salary). Management is going "oh fuck, how did we let this guy become so critical" right now, and as soon as the immediate crisis of you leaving is gone, they will attempt to replace you. You'll be out on your ass as soon as they find/train that someone.
I've had this exact thing confirmed by multiple HR folks I've known, all off the record of course. They admit that they explicitly get asked by management to organize a "manage-out". Hell, this sort of thing is bog-standard for most large HR departments.
> " Companies don’t just allow their managers to get slapped around and make outrageous counter offers to people. Budgets and HR minions can’t stand that. The manager gets dinged by the higher ups because she’s “lost control”."
This seems like where the author is off the mark. In my experience no HR person nor upper-management exec has to chase your boss down to push you out. Your boss already has every intention to manage you out as soon as he drops the counteroffer on the table. Especially when the offer is 2x your salary.
If you get a ludicrous counteroffer, it's probably the perfect time to also get a severance package if you don't have one or get an increase in severance if you do.
I'm heading for a situation that will most definitely result in a counter-offer and my thoughts were to ask for an employment contract to lock in my time and terms so I don't get backstabbed a few months later. But my problem was how to generate and finish the contract before losing one (or both) jobs.
Severance seems a lot easier to get in place and locked in. Does anyone else have experience with this?
> Very few counteroffers are serious counteroffers (serious as in they will keep you on indefinitely at the new salary).
Hell, I bet most of these don't even get honoured. "You understand, we need to get budget, some bureaucracy, but don't you worry, we'll sort it out asap!"... weeks pass, the new money is not coming ("eh, we had some problems, but don't you worry..."), and eventually you get kicked out. Meanwhile, your original offer has probably expired.
Offers for programmers don't expire, unless someone magically made a bunch of new programmers overnight.
And to avoid the situation described in the first paragraph, you get the counteroffer in writing, of course. I know people that ended up doing 2 to 3 iterations of counteroffers. It worked out fine for them.
It depends on the level of programmers we're talking about. I agree that offers for the likes of Steve Jegge don't expire, but ones for "VisualStudio Joe" certainly do, at least outside the Valley.
To clarify, by "expiring" I mean the company finding another suitable candidate.
It's a little tangential to your comment, but I wanted to pick up on one piece.
A ludicrous counter-offer means the company has severe managerial issues and has allowed someone to become absolutely, non-negotiably indispensable.
I don't think it's always managerial issues. Sometimes people are just, well, good.
There is a problem underlying this -- as a result of this managerial "flight risk", many companies in turn decide to regard their employees to be replaceable parts. So they get obsessed with CMM, over-the-top documentation and 'repeatable processes'.
Sometimes someone is indispensable (rarely truly indispensable) because you've let knowledge pool in one person; where is shouldn't. Sometimes it's because your employee is a superstar. It's really important to recognise the difference.
Most of the time companies will assign this person to train others. Works some of the time, except when they're a superstar, in which case it just accelerates their exit.
>That's exactly what these counteroffers are. Very few counteroffers are serious counteroffers (serious as in they will keep you on indefinitely at the new salary).
Is it possible to negotiate a contract for the time period in which they will pay you the new salary and a renewed contract for the old (or higher but reasonable) salary? So you know how long you can stick around and get 2X the money if you want to, and the renewed contract tells you whether they intend on getting rid if you. (I don't have any experience with this, so I'd love to hear others thoughts)
I had almost this exactly situation happen a few years back. I was leaving a decent position for another decent position because it was closer to what I wanted to do with regard to the projects I'd be working on and was paying about 15% more.
I hand in my letter of resignation, boss thinks it over for a bit before offering me a 30% raise. I respectfully decline and start to leave before she doubles the raise.
This is where I had to think about it - I wasn't leaving for my dream job or anything, just another 9-5, and here I was with 4x the difference on the table. I said if she could have me a 3-year employment contract by the end of the day I'd sign it at the agreed salary, which is when she immediately started hedging about needing to talk to the attorneys and the owners, etc.
I was pondering the same strategy, and that same problem came up: the window of "well, I need the lawyers to get into this" and have the process stall long enough to let both deals die and get screwed.
Is it possible to present your own contract and say "have your lawyers look this over and give me an answer in 48 hours"?
The idea of the contract was that I could stand being in my current position as long as the comp was better. But this course of events would just lead to a lot more downstream pain than expected.
Higher up in this chain there was the mention of asking for a severance package, which seems way more easier to mention off the cuff and not look like a premeditated f-you move.
Counteroffers are a fact of daily life with most corporations, there's nothing malicious nor personal about them. A ludicrous counter-offer means the company has severe managerial issues and has allowed someone to become absolutely, non-negotiably indispensable.
IMO perceiving the counteroffer as "buying off his dreams" is a huge overreaction, and in my various jobs has never been a malicious move. Your boss is trying to save his bacon, not destroy your dreams.
The author does nail one point, but for the wrong reasons:
> "So some of these offers are just plain “keep them in the building while we find a replacement who’ll do the job at the price we were paying.”"
That's exactly what these counteroffers are. Very few counteroffers are serious counteroffers (serious as in they will keep you on indefinitely at the new salary). Management is going "oh fuck, how did we let this guy become so critical" right now, and as soon as the immediate crisis of you leaving is gone, they will attempt to replace you. You'll be out on your ass as soon as they find/train that someone.
I've had this exact thing confirmed by multiple HR folks I've known, all off the record of course. They admit that they explicitly get asked by management to organize a "manage-out". Hell, this sort of thing is bog-standard for most large HR departments.
> " Companies don’t just allow their managers to get slapped around and make outrageous counter offers to people. Budgets and HR minions can’t stand that. The manager gets dinged by the higher ups because she’s “lost control”."
This seems like where the author is off the mark. In my experience no HR person nor upper-management exec has to chase your boss down to push you out. Your boss already has every intention to manage you out as soon as he drops the counteroffer on the table. Especially when the offer is 2x your salary.