I am baffled why managers rarely understand 1). In addition to slighting employees, it makes them easy for other companies to poach. It's also messy and expensive to counter offer once a resignation letter has been sent.
> It's also messy and expensive to counter offer once a resignation letter has been sent.
Not to mention that accepting a counter offer is a bad move. The offer might just be to keep you until they find a cheaper replacement. Even if that is not the case you will be perceived as risky - no investment in you, first to fire during tough times.
On top of that it perpetuates the crappy tactic "pay peanuts until they threaten to leave". Nope, counteroffers are for suckers.
From what I gather when you dislike it enough to quit you start to resent little things. No more free coffee, no vacation, too many hours, office politics/culture. Not the money.
Not always the case but when you get to the tipping point it's because things went too far already.
That makes sense to me, once I've decided to move on, I'm done: it's not about the money at that point. But since the article was about job offers, and so were most of the comments, I thought I may have missed something.
Honestly I think 2) is the more common mistake. Yes, employers should be looking to offer regular raises that match what an employee "could" get on the market, but that's hard even when you have the funds available and your employees' best interests in mind.
On the other hand, it's absolutely routine in my experience to watch managers bend rules and ignore feedback to bring in very expensive "senior" people to the team (often based on nothing more than a resume). All the incentives are wrong for this: everyone wants senior underlings, there's the "prestige" value in buying expensive commodities, you want to feel like your team is in the "big leagues".
And if done badly it can do terrible damage to a functioning team. It's never good to bring on an unproductive employee. Unproductive architects will kill your product.
Counter offers have a really low success rate in my experience. That person has already weighed the pros and cons of staying and decided to leave. It won't take much to push them to leave again.
In addition, everybody else in the company now has an incentive to look for a new job themselves since they see a short cut to get a raise.
Better to keep people happy by offering market-rate salaries in the first place.
> I am baffled why managers rarely understand 1). In addition to slighting employees, it makes them easy for other companies to poach.
That is why they combine it with convincing their employees that they should be lucky to have their job. My former employer got a lot of mileage out of that. It was made easier because some of the people there were lucky to have a job (based on competence or specialty).
Not to mention that accepting a counter offer is a bad move. The offer might just be to keep you until they find a cheaper replacement. Even if that is not the case you will be perceived as risky - no investment in you, first to fire during tough times.
On top of that it perpetuates the crappy tactic "pay peanuts until they threaten to leave". Nope, counteroffers are for suckers.