Warning: long story. TL;DR: busted ass for many years as analyst. Ended up with a huge portion of analytical responsibilities. Was underpaid for son long and got significantly better offer at bigger company. Had the satisfaction to quit and gave current employer no hope. Now working last few weeks watching the fall out.
Back story: son of immigrants of the Vietnam war grown up in a small winter state. First job in middle school serving lunch. Pizza cook in teens, have always been the type to just put head down and work. Went to college because parents said there was a college fund, but dropped out 1.5 years in because it didn't exist. Worked at a pharmacy for 3 years up to shift lead and busted my ass. First assistant manager once ridiculed me for not having a degree and I was like BYE FELICIA and moved to my current company.
Fast forward: I started at my current company at the very bottom. Taking phone call orders from religious nut cases deep into the late PM shift like “no I'm not interested in bathing in the light of the lord, do you want some vitamin”
Through luck a manager at the time had worked there for 10 years was like “I want to be a cop now so imma bounce, but this Asian kid can have my job for less money”.
So I get thrown into this random job because I had recently bought this giant book called the 2016 Excel Bible. Read it cover to cover because I'll be damned if I sell vitamin D to cultists until 12am into my retirement years.
I end up grinding, self learning and teach myself analytics and figure out the secret sauce to forecasting calls. Build scheduling models using data and improve coverage, improve retention, grant more vacations, the whole macaroni and cheese. I'm so good at it that I work with the CEO and through my work, I prevent an entire call center from getting laid off and sent to an offshore agency.
That gets me invited to an analytics job where I get paid hourly $18/hr. No degree me getting my foot in but obviously underpaid. But I just do what I always did and just get the job done and learn as much as possible.
Over 5 years I learn SQL, R, more Excel;. I learn stats, analytical methods and take on more and more work, absorbing as much as possible. I literally build all the reports and automate them, furthering the efficiency. I innovate new ways to look at the data and get good at quickly investigating data and finding insights. Made the company tons of money and am so good that the business has no choice but to acknowledge it. My salary improved over the years but was always below median for the job.
So to the juicy part.
Some facts:
1. I was the primary analyst supporting multiple marketing teams (4 major areas) providing answers to all sorts of complex problems.
2. I also was the primary analyst managing website analytics. Learned how to tag events on the site and build all our e-commerce website reports from the ground up.
3. Completed 1500+ analytics projects of varying difficulty during my time with 300 in 2021 alone.
4. Trained 6 analysts during my time.
5. So good at my job that my boss was promoted to Director because there wasn't a need to manage me due to my productivity and performance.
6. People across the business leveraged me for analytics and I had build strong rapport with everyone. I had done stand up comedy for 3 years and it taught me how to win people over.
7. The company had gone through so many CEOs, leadership, and did 2 mass layoffs in the 7 years I was there. And I had witnessed all those.
8. Despite always going above and beyond, strong annual reviews, taking more and more responsibilities, and I'm general becoming a better analyst; boss continues to focus entirely on what I do wrong than acknowledge what I do right. Tiny mistakes that have no huge impact to our projects and are the result of being stressed so thin.
Well, I had been promoted to a level 2 analyst a few years back but I always knew I had been underpaid. I was over working myself, always bringing up burnout with no effort from the business to improve it. I documented all my work to show my productivity and could prove I was putting in 50+ work weeks with almost no breaks just to keep up with demand.
Then an epiphany occurs. A few months ago, my annual reviews come in and I'm meeting expectations despite all the insane workloads and pushing myself to handle more. And I get a compensation letter and it reads I get a 3% raise for a salary already 10-12% below median market rate for the same job (not factoring skills or accomplishments).
So I see for the second year in a row I got 3% which is essentially a paycut because of inflation and our insurance costs went up. And out of frustration, I applied to the first place I could: a fortune 100 company. One of the places where employees leave reviews of it being a great place to work with good work life balance. Also a place where I saw the workers had stayed there for 10+ years. The current job I was at was lucky if people got past 2 years.
And after a series of interesting and being transparent about my skills and experience, I was offered a lateral job move. Same role, better work life balance, 100% remote for a 24% pay increase. I mean better base pay, 4x bonus potential, more vacation PTO, double 401K match, just all around better opportunity across every metric.
Of course I take the offer and break the news to my current company professionally outlining all my reasons:
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I've been overworked for years and despite me making efforts to improve fair working conditions, nothing was done
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I've been underpaid below market for some time and the company never tried to make it right and assumed I would just take it. A coworker had tried to negotiate and was met with the age old “there's no budget” which promoted me to just start looking for a new job
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There was an unhealthy expectation that the high workloads and always catering to the needs of marketing and the business was just part of the job and role despite severely being underpaid.
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Always being criticized for minor things rather than being appreciated by my manager.
I went into transparent detail of all the things I did and told them that noone else on the team could pick those skills up in any decent amount of time. That my departure would leave a huge gap in their team because of their lack of effort in retaining their talent. And that in no way would I consider a counter offer because any offer made now would be desperate and be too late. I had to say that to both my boss's boss and the Chief of Marketing.
And I was given every excuse:
Them: “You are very valuable and we can't do this without you!”
Me: “Well I was underpaid for so many years so the sentiment doesn't match the actions taken.”
Them: “We were planning on paying you more eventually.”
Me: “My boss gave me my compensation raise and didn't communicate that it would grow later and at no point in the past had that ever happened? I don't trust that to be true.”
Them: “Would you be open to waiting 24 hours for a counter?”
Me: “They could offer me $300K and I would say no because I can't trust there wouldn't be consequences for leaving in the first place so I will professionally reject all counter offers as to not waste time”.
I was calm, had my facts and outlined how easy it was for this no degree young dude to get into a big data driven company that was just better across the board.
I watched the color drain from everyone's faces because they realized how much they took for granted, how they now risked significant amounts of money because my data driven insights will no longer be provided, morale with the people I supported will drop significantly all in the efforts to save a few thousand dollars in payroll.
And I held firm ony refusal for a counter offer which has solidified that I will be leaving and there is nothing they can do about it. They made their bed and they realize howf screwed they really are.
And honestly, it was incredibly liberating. Knowing I'll have a new opportunity to learn from a better company with less insane workloads, with fair pay in line with my worth.
I know my boss and leadership are going to scramble and this could mean a collapse in our analytics team due to my contribution, but this is what happens when management does little to retain their talent.
Cheers everyone to a happy 2022 and hope people can escape the toxic workplaces they are in!