I got an IT job working for a factory in the southern US.
This was a very small farming town of about 3,000 people so IT people are non-existent, in fact I lived 2+ hours away from this town when I took the job and moved to that town. This is important information for later.
When I took the job, it was a contract position for 29k per year and the intention was to hire me full time directly to the company within one year. My co-worker was full time with the company and was making 93k per year. For roughly 3 years it was just us 2 IT guys supporting 2 factories. Then all of the sudden they give us a 3rd location to support and at this time I was hired on full time with the company for a salary of 31k per year….my co-worker still made over 90k.
Around this same time of getting extra workload + getting hired full time – my boss retired, my co-worker got promoted to the regional manager and turned into my new boss which left me being the only IT guy to support 3 factories.
I averaged 16 hour days 7 days a week for over a year. I worked literally every single weekend, every holiday (thanksgiving, christmas, new years, 4th of july….every….single….holiday), every anniversary, every birthday of mine my wife and my kids was missed because I was working.
I was on call 24/7 for 3 different locations by myself for over a year. There were no bonuses at this company unless you're management.
This went on for a little over a year and I told my boss I needed my salary to match his old salary before his promotion (90k per year), or I was leaving. This seemed fair to me considering i was making 1/3 of his old salary and I had 3x the workload he had. We discussed my raise several times over the course of a month and finally he comes back to me with a pay raise of $800 annually….a pay raise of $66 per MONTH before taxes.
he said that was the most the company could possibly afford. This is a multinational company with a presence in over 20 countries and profit earnings of roughly 4 billion profit per year.
Fast forward 3 months, I've found another job that doubled my salary with a tiny fraction of the workload, I turn in my 2 week notice and my boss and HR freaks out because there are zero IT people in this tiny farming community and it took them 6 months just to find me when they hired me. So they start doing every single little thing that they can to make my work and personal life as miserable as possible for the last 2 weeks – including writing me up saying i was a disgruntle employee because I had turned in my 2 week notice. This was a right to work state which means workers have little rights and there are no unions.
The way these IT systems were set up required 100% uptime, if a printer, workstation or network switch went down for more than 90 minutes….the company lost $218,000 per MINUTE until connectivity was restored.
On my last week of work my boss was in Costa Rica with his new girlfriend and one of the 3 sites had an issue, there was no IT within the company except me and my boss that had any possible way to work on the problem and I had just turned in my phone and computer about 12 hours prior. My personal phone and email and facebook was blowing up from msgs from everyone at that site trying to get me to go back into my old office, get my old company computer and phone and log in to fix it for free at 2 AM even though i technically didn't even work for the company anymore because nobody could get in touch with my boss in Costa Rica.
Incredibly unlucky timing for my previous employer. I sat awake in bed for hours just watching my phone / email blow up in the middle of the night and I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my life. It was the most glorious karma I could have ever asked for and it was basically instant karma too which is rare.
TLDR~ My boss / company didn't want to give me fair and equal pay so it cost them over $40 million when the system crashed the very night that I left the company.