I dunno about this one. If one of my top engineers wants to leave and there's a chance that I can get him to stay by offering him a decent raise ... then I'm going to try to give him a raise after thinking through a couple of things
1. Did the ground shift underneath me overnight in terms of engineer salaries? This can happen very easily ... a couple of startups move into town and start trying to poach devs ... guess what, salaries are going to go up and if you don't play, you're going to lose your best guys. that one engineer leaving might just be the beginning of half of your team coming to you going "Hey man, these guys just offered me $140k ... you guys are paying me $95k ..."
2. What does this guy mean to the team ... and not just in cranking out high quality code? What would the effect of his departure on morale be. If he's very well liked and looked up to as a mentor/leader by younger developers, I'm inclined to try and come up with something to get him to say.
That being said, I'm not a fan of trying to do an exact match, just because, it feels too much like being held hostage. What I'd do is try to find out what they like about the new offer so much and see what I can do ... things like health insurance, shares, flex time and even process changes seem to get far more mileage out of developers than cold cash. I'd try to put together a package for them (with increased salary of course).
If that got them to stay. I'd re-evaluate the current package of my entire team and see about extending the same deal to everybody, to (hopefully) pre-empt another situation like this in the near future. That way, if I got another engineer wanting to leave, then I know that there isn't that much more I can do to get them to stay.
PS: Learn to be distrustful of the the words "always" and "never" ... because in real life its usually more like "it depends"
1. Did the ground shift underneath me overnight in terms of engineer salaries? This can happen very easily ... a couple of startups move into town and start trying to poach devs ... guess what, salaries are going to go up and if you don't play, you're going to lose your best guys. that one engineer leaving might just be the beginning of half of your team coming to you going "Hey man, these guys just offered me $140k ... you guys are paying me $95k ..."
2. What does this guy mean to the team ... and not just in cranking out high quality code? What would the effect of his departure on morale be. If he's very well liked and looked up to as a mentor/leader by younger developers, I'm inclined to try and come up with something to get him to say.
That being said, I'm not a fan of trying to do an exact match, just because, it feels too much like being held hostage. What I'd do is try to find out what they like about the new offer so much and see what I can do ... things like health insurance, shares, flex time and even process changes seem to get far more mileage out of developers than cold cash. I'd try to put together a package for them (with increased salary of course).
If that got them to stay. I'd re-evaluate the current package of my entire team and see about extending the same deal to everybody, to (hopefully) pre-empt another situation like this in the near future. That way, if I got another engineer wanting to leave, then I know that there isn't that much more I can do to get them to stay.
PS: Learn to be distrustful of the the words "always" and "never" ... because in real life its usually more like "it depends"