You hand in your notice, and within a day somebody senior asks for twenty minutes. There is a number on the table now, and it is bigger than the one you had yesterday.
It is flattering, and it deserves a real answer rather than a rule you read on the internet.
Start with the arithmetic nobody says out loud. The money existed the whole time. It took a resignation to release it, which tells you something about how raises actually get decided where you work, and that information is worth as much as the offer.
Then ask what the money is for. Write down, before you ever resign, the two or three things that would have made you stay. Not vague ones. A move to the platform team. A path to leading something within a year. Fewer weekends. Then hold the counter offer against your own list instead of against the adrenaline of being wanted.
If you were leaving purely because you were underpaid, and the number now matches the market, staying can be a perfectly sound decision. Plenty of people do it and are glad.
If you were leaving because of the work, the manager, or the absence of any road forward, the money changes none of that. You will be back in the same conversation in six months, with your leverage spent and a fresh offer nowhere in sight.
Anything they promise that is not money, get in writing with a date attached. The team move, the title at the next cycle, the scope. Not because anyone is lying, but because the person promising it may be reorganised out of the position to deliver it, and a dated line in an email survives that.
Think about how it will be read. In some places a counter offer is normal and forgotten by Christmas. In others you quietly become the person who has one foot out. You know which of those you work in. Judge your own building, not the general rule.
And whichever way you go, tell the other employer fast and honestly. It is a small industry, they may be your next call, and how you handle this week is the part people remember.
– Asael Shinder
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