A 50% raise, and he still left

An engineer handed in his notice. The company came back fast with a counter offer: a 50% raise.

That is a serious number. He left anyway. His last words to the CTO were:

"So where was this before?"

Some background. For a long time before that, his pay had been ignored, whether on purpose or not. Only when he resigned did the money show up, all at once, and 50% of it.

Most people hear this and think he was being stubborn. I think he did the math. The 50% answered the question "what are you worth?" By then he was asking something else. If I work hard here, will anyone notice? And if they could always afford this, why didn't they pay it before? The company treated two questions as one.

Two separate accounts

Frederick Herzberg made a point in 1959 that gets lost whenever people summarize him. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction don't sit on the same line.

Low pay or a bad office make people unhappy. Fix them, and people stop complaining. That's all. They don't suddenly care more.

The data agrees. Timothy Judge and colleagues pooled 92 independent samples in 2010. Pay level correlated about 0.15 with job satisfaction, and only 0.23 with satisfaction with pay itself. More money makes you happier about your money. It barely touches how you feel about the work.

His case shows how the two accounts leak into each other. Pay is a first-account problem. Left alone long enough, it drained the second account too. He stopped believing good work would be rewarded. By the time the money came, the other account was already empty.

So if you're holding a counter offer, ask which account your reason for leaving sits in. If it's money, the raise may genuinely fix it. If it's the other one, six months from now you'll probably be the same person, just better paid.

And if the raise only appeared after you said you were leaving, ask one more thing. Next time you need something here, will you have to resign again to get it?

What I used to believe

A few years ago I wrote a short piece backing Daniel Pink's "Motivation 3.0": autonomy, mastery, purpose. Intrinsic motivation beats rewards and punishments.

I don't think that was wrong. It was too tidy. It made external motivation sound second-rate, as if you only count as motivated when you love what you do.

Pink's ideas come mostly from self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. The original has a layer I find more useful. Outside demands can slowly turn into your own reasons. You start at "I do it or I get in trouble." Then "I'd feel guilty if I didn't." Then "I think this matters." Eventually, "this is what I want to do." Two people can carry the same target and sit at completely different points on that scale.

So I rarely ask myself whether I love a job anymore. I ask how many of the things this place wants from me I actually agree with.

Self-determination theory names three needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. With teams in East Asia, I track a fourth one separately, belonging. Having freedom at work is not the same as feeling the place is yours.

A five-minute test

Think of the stretch at work when you were most absorbed, and the stretch when you felt most flat. Write down the conditions for each. Who your manager was. How much you got to decide. Whether anyone cared about what you produced. How well you knew the people around you.

The difference is usually somewhere in those lines. Pay rarely shows up.

If you're weighing a counter offer, do this first.

Where this stops working

When pay is low enough to hurt your life, money is the first thing to fix, and there's nothing noble about pretending otherwise. Everything above applies after that line. Where the line sits depends on the person, and I can't tell you where yours is.

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