So a few years ago I got hired as a developer at a small startup. Salary was never discussed in the interview and there was no salary range posted either. Boy was I young and naïve and fresh out of college. I was supposed to get the salary emailed to me via my job offer but they conveniently “forgot” to email it so I got it in person on my first day, for half the market value. I didn’t have any other offers or experience at the time so I accepted hoping I could climb the corporate ladder. Again, young and naïve.
The tech team was just three other devs and we got along very well. Fast forward a couple of years I had gotten a few raises but still at half the market value which kept going up with inflation. The last 6 months of work is when the writing really started appearing on the wall that it was time to jump from the sinking ship that was my job. They ended all remote work, ended shorter summer hours on Friday’s, and the biggest one was how often they kept repeating the plea to vendors that they are a small company aka they have no money. This was the biggest red flag that it was time to update my resume.
My teammates picked up on this too and one by one they started turning in their notices with jobs lined up. I was the last remaining developer and employee with any technical knowledge. The first thing I did was ask my boss for a raise to account for the higher workload and he told me he couldn’t do it because he had to account for the replacement employees’ salaries. The workload was starting to pile up as I did the work of four people on my own. Not one employee got hired at the half-the-market salaries my job was posting, even after they took down the salary ranges hoping to attract lure in more applicants. I eventually got a raise after they gave up on hiring replacements but I still sat at half the competitive rate. After months of “no one wants to work anymore” type comments from my boss as no new teammates were hired, I was burning out and was seriously contemplating leaving without a job lined up just to focus on the leetcode grind full time. I really didn’t want to have a gap on my resume and I needed the money so I saw things through.
At one point the burnout got at its worst. My temper was getting shorter, my work ethic was getting worse, my motivation for anything was dwindling, and I was becoming an absolute shell of a person. I had had enough at that point. I walked straight into my boss’ office and demanded my salary be doubled to match the average market salary, to compensate for doing my entire non-existent team’s workload on my own, and to cover the transportation costs from revoking remote work. My boss told me that I already got a raise and I shouldn’t be expecting them more than once a year. He also said that he can’t afford to give anyone a raise due to increasing costs and I shouldn’t expect one for another year and a half. What really put the final nail in the coffin for me was him telling me that even if I got an offer for the market rate, he wouldn’t even be able to counter-offer half of what I’d be getting. It was time to start looking.
After a month I finally accepted an offer that paid the competitive salary for developers and I handed in my notice. Reality began to sink in for the management team as they didn’t even bother trying to counter offer and tried guilting me into staying but I told them “This isn’t a negotiation, this is a notice”. And remember how they couldn’t afford a 50% pay raise? Well the new job posting for my position had a 50% higher salary. Just goes to show you that companies will pay you with as little as they can get away with. The new job was fully remote and compensated much higher than what I was used to that it was so foreign to me. I told my former teammates that the last part of the squad left and now we have all moved on to bigger and better things. We’re all going out to dinner to celebrate our new beginnings.