Presumably there’s a karmic payoff for this, or someone at X company knows someone at Y who can tell them whether or not you’re actually in the pipeline or have received an offer. Perhaps there’s an element of bluffing or calling bluffs in all of this.
I like karma, but wouldn't checking have the appearance of illegal collusion between the companies? For example, would it look like they were price-fixing?
"Oh, your honor, I was only checking whether they had an offer. We totally weren't discussing how we'd not raise our offers, with the goal of suppressing wages."
iirc there’s already an app for that in some sense, and a good amount of plausible deniability and backroom politics that can make up for any potential lawsuit. Similar issue to “proving” any kind of discrimination: a smooth corporate operator can CYA well enough to create a fake paper trail to justify any sort of decision making.
Would you be compelled to tell them the offer was from company Y? Or are you saying this is all predicated on Y being a famous company?
there is also the risk of getting black listed for lying.
We've heard nowadays how hard it is to even get to the interview for many companies so theres probably plenty of candidates who do not have many other offers prepared or even close to prepared.
Another issue is timing. Theres been times when I've started the interview process with two companies but one is on a much shorter timeline than the other so now I have an offer for one whereas I am still waiting on an interview that isn't for even a couple weeks for another, if not longer.
Not gonna lie, last time I went through the interview process I just told them I have other offers already even when I didn't. It worked in my favor I believe but feels like to get the best outcome you just have to be okay with basically lying out your ass - and that goes both ways, as the employer and the employee since it seems like even the companies feel fine with dragging their asses on concrete unless you have other stuff going on.