Slashdot Mirror
Is it Wrong to Accept an Employment Counter-Offer?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I was happily working away at a low-paying but otherwise good job I'd had for several months, after taking a huge pay cut when the dot.bomb bubble burst. Then a recruiter contacted me with a very nice potential position - I interviewed and received an offer with a 50% increase in pay, everything else nearly the same. When I received the offer and decided I was interested, I broke the news to my current employer - to my surprise they extended a counter-offer with a matching salary, thereby eliminating my only reason for considering the other job. However, I talked to some friends and checked the web for ideas and realized that there are a *lot* of ppl out there who believe you should never accept a counter-offer. They make some good points, and there are a lot of those pages - but on the web popularity breeds increased popularity, in a self-feeding cycle, so I'm wondering if the numbers are skewed unrealistically. Is it really that rare to do well by accepting a counter-offer? Do Slashdot readers have experience with counter-offers from present employers, positive or negative?"
However, 99.99% of organizations will behave exactly as the 10 reasons describe. Yes, I know, it was corporate employers who destroyed the idea of corporate loyalty in the 1980s. It is corporate employers who dump their long-timers to reduce medical costs and grab the pension money. It is corporate employers who will lay off 10,000 people to get a 1% pop in the stock price.
But the very same people who do these things will turn around and destroy the career of a person who accepts a counteroffer. Why? They have "shown disloyalty". Doesn't make sense, I know, but that is the way it is. Take the original offer and don't look back.
sPh
There are two ways I can see this having played out in your current employer's mind.
1. Crap. This one's leaving, but I gotta keep him here for now. I'll give him a raise, get him to finish the project, and see what happens later.
2. This is what I get for not paying attention to pay rates enough. This guy really is worth more than he's getting to me; after all, I was paying him more before the dotcom bust. Maybe I'll offer him the raise he deserves.
Obviously, #1 implies your employer sees you as a merc for hire. #2 means your employer actually cares. Believe me, I've been around enough to know that #2 is practically worth working for at your current pay (assuming it's enough to live on).
You know your employer better than I do. The question is, do you think your employer cares about you and your career? If so, I'd take the counteroffer, and just to make your loyalty clear, work some longer hours for a while to show how much you appreciate it. If you think #1 is closer to the case, decline politely and enjoy your new job.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
Employment is (or should be!) a more complicated situation than "how much cash am I given". If money was your sole reason for leaving and you were happy otherwise, then hey, the counteroffer should be fine. On the other hand, if there were other factors -- job duties, coworkers, schedule, general happiness, whatever -- then you need to consider whether the counteroffer addresses those. If it's just a larger bribe to tolerate a still-bad situation, you probably don't want to stay. If, on the other hand, your employer really doesn't want to lose you and demonstrates an effort to make you stay, than you should definitely consider it.
I was once in a very similar situation. Although I did not go thru a salary reduction, the place became a terrible place to work at after the first wave of layoffs. The best people got canned, and those with seniority survived that first wave. These were the folks who did little work. I ended up having to do the work of 5 poeple and it sucked, while the surviving seniors still sat around on their butts pretending to work. I found a new job with more pay, but let the current employer talk me into staying with a matching pay increase. The work still stayed the same... sweatshop-like, but now my bosses had a bad attitude towards me for having had the gall to look for another job in the first place and "forceing them to pay me more to stay". The job then sucked worse for a few more months meanwhile the new job offer vanished and I had to wait even months longer before another new job offer came along that was agreeable, when it did, I bolted outta the current job asap, no pleading from my current boss would change my mind. I explained to him, as dryly and factually as a Vulcan would have explained, why my perspective of my current job just wasn't fair to me anymore and thus the reason for me wanting to leave. He couldn't argue with my reasons, they were all true, and I parted company in a civil manner, not burning any bridges. My predictions of the further downward spiral of that company all came true exactly as I said they would. After a couple more waves of layoffs, my former boss, who was now a vice-pres of the company finally decided to stand up to the senior management in support of what was left of his staff who were being treated geniunely unfairly, he got laid off for this... if only he would've had the balls to stand up earlier, he might have made a difference. Meanwhile I'm still happily employed at my new job.
Run, don't walk... to that new job.
As far as the company knows, an employee who is silent is happy with his or her current salary. Sure, they could just throw money at all of their apparently happy employees, but is that the kind of culture where he should want to work (hint: see "dot-com bubble")?
In other industries, offers and counteroffers are, if not commonplace, certainly not unusual. In investment banking and consulting, entire groups get raided, and companies go to great pains to keep their people, usually after a resignation letter is sitting on someone's desk. For someone with the requisite skills and knowledge, it seems to me that the leverage provided by such a letter represents a somewhat more compelling argument than the average request for some consideration.
-db
When I was in a similar position, I choose not to accept the counter-offer and left for my current employer (now 4 years later...)
As with just about anything, your mileage will vary.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'