I'm not sure how this works in practice. This means that timing of the offers needs to align pretty closely. How long will a company let you sit on an offer before they move on? I've only ever interviewed or worked at companies that are at most a few hundred people. When I get an offer, I'm pressured for an answer within days. Once or twice I've been able to stretch that to like 2-3 weeks.

People just need to lie more often. In many cases, they will not verify anything. If they require proof, you can say everything was a verbal offer with no official documentation. That's often how it is because many recruiters don't want to go through the paperwork process before there's an agreement.

That said, I've found the "competing offer" element to be of little to no value. Even when I had 7 competing offers, not one of them negotiated more than maybe 10% on the amount. The one that gave me the largest bump didn't even need to know about competing offers - they just wanted to know what would get me to sign. I said X and they did it.

> That said, I've found the "competing offer" element to be of little to no value. Even when I had 7 competing offers, not one of them negotiated more than maybe 10% on the amount.

Thank you, glad to see not everyone in this thread is a super-rich SV engineer that never had to even lift a finger to get the next job.

>The magic incantation is competing offer.

Depends on the company. If you were applying where I work and tried to use a competing offer to get a better offer, they'd just suggest you go with the other offer.

Depends on what an employer is looking for: A relatively better pool of candidates or those who don't know how to ask for things.

Ask all you like, you'll just get a generic "thanks, we decided to move forward with another candidate" response maximum at reply number three.

Wish more people on HN worked at least 5 years outside the USA. It would give them valuable insights.

So in other words, the offer is non-negotiable?

In that case you could still work for that company, but would your company offer a higher salary with any other negotiating strategy?

This competing offer thing is relatively new and restricted to the top internet and wall street kind of companies. Where there is too much money and they just want people at the top of the ladder all the time, even if they don't need them.

This kind of requires companies winning above and beyond anybody else. Those are rare.

Every where else, its work as usual and people as usual. Nobody is important. People join and leave all the time. They could care less about whatever other offers you have.