The usual recommendation is to go get another offer at the salary you want and use that to make your case.
Now, I use to think that the "spiteful boss" was a myth, ie the boss that is going to be all pissy because they feel blackmailed and give you a hard time. I actually did encounter it for the first time in 2 decades a few years ago. I was VP of eng at the time and one of my reports used this technique to show that we were clearly lowballing him (which I knew, but budget was controlled by the CFO). The CTO got mad with a big M, saying that he didn't want to be blackmailed or held hostage of whatever. Threw a big tantrum and we basically lost an engineer.
As I said, it was the one occurrence in my 20 years in the industry so it's not very common. Most managers understand that it's business, you're showing them the data and they don't want to lose someone who's doing a good job.
> Most managers understand that it's business, you're showing them the data and they don't want to lose someone who's doing a good job.
Yeah, exactly.
If a 150k engineer brings me an offer for 175 and asks me to match, my options are to either:
* match
* let them go, lose 25k of company productivity while my team interviews & hire & pinch hit for someone who left, then lose 40k in time training a new candidate & waiting for them to come up to speed
The corollary to this: you don’t want to do it often. A previous coworker did this twice & on the second ask his bosses bosses boss (CIO) brought him into his office, looked him in the eyes, and said “last time. no more.” So negotiate well and bring your best offer.
If the guy can regularly get offers that much higher than what they are paying him, that's what he's worth, and they can meet it or he'll walk. Maybe just actually pay the guy his market rate and he won't bother wasting time job searching.
* Offer them 250K to let them know you really want them to stay while also ensuring they feel properly valued by the company, which also exceeds the external offer by high enough that the other company probably won't counter counter. If you can't offer 250K, but, say, 200K is in your budget, then also throw in some more vacation days. Also throw in a mandatory minimum severance guarantee for good measure, so they don't have to worry about layoffs.
Now, I use to think that the "spiteful boss" was a myth, ie the boss that is going to be all pissy because they feel blackmailed and give you a hard time. I actually did encounter it for the first time in 2 decades a few years ago. I was VP of eng at the time and one of my reports used this technique to show that we were clearly lowballing him (which I knew, but budget was controlled by the CFO). The CTO got mad with a big M, saying that he didn't want to be blackmailed or held hostage of whatever. Threw a big tantrum and we basically lost an engineer.
As I said, it was the one occurrence in my 20 years in the industry so it's not very common. Most managers understand that it's business, you're showing them the data and they don't want to lose someone who's doing a good job.