I think counter offers in general are pretty rare, especially in a bad job market. Like unicorn rare. In almost 30 years I’ve never left a company where it was even mentioned during the resignation. The company just says “Well, bye.” Like the Tombstone meme.

Counter offers aren't rare, but they require good timing and finesse to be effective as leverage. You can't simply shove it in your manager's face and use it to demand a raise. You may first need to maneuver into a place where you play a crucial role in a project, for example.

Obviously not everyone can do that. Then again, not everyone can get offers whenever they need also, especially since doing so requires a large network and regular interviews. Most people have neither.

Counteroffers for lower-level engineers are fairly rare. These companies believe that L4s are sufficiently common that another one will come along. It’s unfortunate especially when an L4 is seriously outperforming their level. But that’s a big company for you.

Having received a counter offer more than once, and accepting it once, I'd say that it's better at that point to just leave.

If you're already at the point of having decided to resign, you've already done a lot of soul searching (well, unless it was an easy design to leave) and weighed everything up and decided to leave. Even if the financials were an important factor in making that decision to leave, by the time you've convinced yourself it's the right choice, you'll have looked into all the other areas of the job that really annoy you. Even if you take the extra money, those things will eat away at you, and you'll probably always second guess yourself about how much better life might have been at the place you had lined up and then turned down for the payoff.

In other words, once you've made the decision to resign, there's part of you that has already mentally checked out of the job, and that will never be satisfied staying in the job, even with more money.

The counter offer I accepted was fairly early on in my career, adding about 25% to my pitifully low salary at the time. In relative terms it was massive, and most importantly allowed me to get a mortgage (at the time mortgage companies in the UK were very strict about not lending more than 4x your annual salary). However, the discontentment I had with the job remained and within 6 months I decided I still had to leave because I was still unhappy there even despite the extra money. Sure enough, the next job was much more fun because I was working on something new.

I've not been on the other side, but just from my own experiences, I don't think it'd ever be worth making a counter offer unless you knew they were chronically underpaid compared to the cost of hiring someone new AND you new that even when they were unhappy at work they'd still bring enough revenue to more than justify the extra spending knowing that it's likely to just be a short term fix.

TLDR: Once you've decided to leave a job, just do it. If an employee wants to leave a job, just and wish them well and let them leave.

Ditto. From all the places that I’ve quit, the only counter offer I’d accept would be “we’ll implement this structure/process change that is slowly killing your will to work here”.

Managers will happily make that promise. Just keep in mind that it's likely an empty one.

Yeah it honestly feels like the problem here – it's a common pattern where someone tries several times at a promo, then transfers to another team and gets promoted immediately.