TL;DR Subordinate is leaving company, I ask them how much they were paid as I was never allowed to see their file on HR system – turns out they were paid 25% more despite me managing them.
For some background:
I've always known the saying that to get paid more, you have to move around from job to job, but holy shit did I not know it would come back to bite me in the arse this badly.
The story (it's a long one sorry):
I've been with a company for 9 years. In that time, I rised through the ranks, from bottom of the mill helpdesk, all the way up to my current position of senior devops engineer. In this time my pay has.. not neccessarily kept up with market rates, but the company is small enough and flexible enough that when the bosses told me there wasn't the budget for pay raises, I believed them.
Fast forward to 18 months ago whilst I was still devops. Workload was increasing, and with this increase in workload came the requirement for help. The company employed a devops engineer with me, so we were technically equal, with me doing the bulk of the training and managing expectations/job requirements whilst with us.
3 months after they were hired (January), management conversed with me that we needed to increase the workload of the development team, and so I would become their direct manager, and that the company was pleased with my performance. In becoming manager, they wanted to increase my salary from £32k, to £36k, on “a three month probation”. So despite doing the work of “36k position”, they wouldn't give the payrise until 3 months later, with the potential of another £4k increase after 6 months and if the company was doing well financially.
April comes around, and I get the increase, but despite becoming my colleagues manager, they won't allow me to “manage” them within our HR system. I enquire, and they get weird about “oh there were issues with the permissions we could give you, so in the organisation chart they'll still be equal to you, but they'll report directly to you”.
I start to believe that the reason they're edgy about this is because my employee must be paid more than my £32k (maybe £33-34k?) and so push back, saying exactly that – that I'm pretty sure the reason they're not letting me manage them is for this reason, because it would be angering for anyone to find out their colleagues are on more, so they were hiding it from me.
I never got a straight answer – the company kept saying it was a “permissions issue”.
Fast forward to now – I've been on the £40k salary for 2 months now (9 months after becoming my colleagues manager, and a year after they were hired), which is the most anyone in my family has ever been paid, so it definitely feels like an achievement (if one I know I could be on more if I went with another company). My subordinate is now leaving the company, and we have a great rapport, so I ask them out of work if pay was the reason I couldn't be their “manager”.
They reveal to me that they asked the company for £35k when they started, and the company offered £40k. They've been on £40k for the entirety of their employment.
My own colleague and subbordinate has been on 25% more pay than me for ~16 months.
I was speechless, and truth be told, I've continued to be speechless since yesterday when I found out. Sickened even. Hence why I've made this post. I have to get it out there somehow to someone.
So here I am; I'm slightly drunk, angry, a recession is looming over the world, and I feel trapped in a company that apparently thinks I'm so worthless that they were happy to do this to me.
A part of me just wants to give my notice in this second (Contract with the company dictates 4 weeks notice), say fuck you to the company, and be done with it. But, I have a kid on the way, so I cannot make rash decisions like that on a whim.
When others say loyalty never pays, listen to them. It never, ever does.