Counter-offer 18

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I know this guy... who knows this girl... She has worked for her current employer for 10yrs and pulls 82K/yr. She accepted an offer from another company for 87K/yr. Before her 2 week notice was up, her boss called her into his office. "Would you mind telling me what your offer was", he asked. She didn't want them to counter offer, so she lied and said 94K/yr. To her surprise, they countered with 97K/yr.

First off, good for her! Now, what does she do? Thoughts?

 

[monkeydog]

82K per year is slave wages?
Good one.

Re-read the thread. She did not want a counter offer, so she lied about the offer.

 

[jmw]

...but accepted the resulting counter offer....




JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[Gymmeh]

Where can I apply for this job with slave wadges?

 

[josephv]

Question: If one day prior to her handing in her two weeks notice, she asked her boss "how much are you willing to pay me to keep me employed here" and her boss replied "your current salary", is her boss lying / being ethical?

No, the boss's actions are completely unethical

Questions: So, why does she want to keep working for an unethical boss? Why stoop to his level of unethical behaviour by lying? Why put yourself in a situation where you can be let go after a major project (as spongebob and others perfectly described)? Keeping in mind the boss was not willing to keep her a few weeks ago, and now he has spontaneously changed his mind.

 

[GTstartup]

On rethinking, I'm not sure this is unethical. It's only because her intent was not to garner a higher raise that it seems unethical to accept it anyway.

If this is unethical, then almost every pay raise negotiation I have been in has been unethical.

How would it go if you told the truth every time your boss, or new employer asked you how much you think you are worth? Or how much it would take for you to not move to a competitor?

It's like going in to a car dealership that has a car for sale for $25,000 and saying "I'm not paying a dime over 20K for this car" and walking out with a deal for 22K. Is that a lie?

 

[Twoballcane]

...sorry trying to be cynical. I guess what I tried to say was that if she made $82K and the boss knew all this time she was worth $97K, that's a delta of $15K. So the boss new he was underpaying the person by a substantial amount of money. So which is more unethical? The person lieing about the new company's offer or the boss that for the past ten years knew she was actuall worth more, but never told her? My pick would be the latter. The boss took advantage of her, getting more work with less pay.

Tobalcane
"If you avoid failure, you also avoid success."

 

[PatCouture]

Maybe the boss just doesn't know what is a good salary according to the market and then when he heard that she was "suppose" to get $94K then he didn't verify if it's true and decided it was better to pay her more that to try to find somebody else.

I think that every boss obviously what to pay less for his employee but he will also try to stay competitive to the market so that he doesn't lose good workers.

After 10 years at the same place how can you know how much you are worth? You have to talk to other people that do the same thing as you are, or you have to send resume to see what kind of offer you can have, maybe for some professions there are salary ladder already in place but what if there are not?

Please correct me if I'm wrong but what I'm trying to say is that a lot of times the salary is accorded regarding some specific quality of each person so it comes down to it as a negociation and everybody that I know that is good at negociation is not always telling the truth or at least not ALL the truth.

Of course if I was her boss and knew that she lied about the $94K so that I give her $97k I too would be pissed off and would see her in a negative way.

If I were in her shoe I think that how MedicinEng proposed to negotiate for less by being transparent would have been a lot better for my conscious.

The bottom line is that, as some other mentionned, it cannot be just about the money and I'm pretty sure that even with a salary of $97K in six months she will still want to be out of there. Unless there is something that we don't know.

Have a nice day

Patrick

 

[josephv]

Hello Patrick,

You make several good points. I just want to add one thing to your comment:

"Maybe the boss just doesn't know what is a good salary according to the market."

In my honest opinion, a good boss should know what is a good salary according to the market with respect to the people that work for him.

You make a great point, in saying that the boss maybe was not deliberately underpaying the employee; however, if he did not realize this, he was not doing his homework.

That boss is not the sort of person I would like to work for, but I really can only speak for myself.

Thanks for your insights.

 

[PatCouture]

I agree with you Josephv but I'm still wondering how do you get those homework done? What kind of source is there so that you know what is a good salary? Because I may soon find myself hiring someone in the same field as I am and other than some job offer that I turned down and others that I accepted I don't really know what is considered an average salary. Maybe I could call a few people that I know who have the same qualification that would tell me their salary but I can't call competitors to know how much they are giving for their people.

Maybe I should start a thread about this but I will save it for later

Patrick

 

[josephv]

good point, Patrick...

Since this thread and a few others do touch upon salary, I created a new thread called "Salary information for engineers" in the "How to Improve Myself ..." forum in order to share salary data. The one I was using is the Professional Engineers Ontario survey (which was free, but now they charge for it... oy).

 

[josephv]

ok, I created the thread in the "overcoming obstacles..." forum... not sure why, but I do know I need coffee...

 

[rerig]

In the Aviation Field, Trade Publications have an annual Salaries edition.
Type of Company, type of Job, Location.
i.e.: Repair Station, Engineer, Southwest USA

I'll bet most industries have somewhere to look to get the current pay scales.

Rerig

 

[jetmaker]

Interesting thread...

The concept of a company counter-offering simply over money is deporable to me. It fosters ill-will within the department as you are resentful that you were not properly valued by the company, the company will expect more performance for their buck, and finally your coworkers might be resentful over the raise which you extracted. If taking a counter-offer strictly for money, one should be looking for a new job within 6 months anyways.


jetmaker

 

[SylvestreW]

Previous job I had, a co-worker quit outright because of the incompetence of management. Long story short, they re-hired him with a large (found out later it was ~25%) raise. He lasted another 6 months before he quit again.

I've seen it twice where people quit but were enticed to come back. In both cases, the people weren't happy.
I've seen more than a dozen people quit and go to new jobs. In every single case, the people were better off in the new job.

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Aercoustics.com