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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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..."

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...

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?

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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