A little over a year ago I started working at an engineering firm. For the most part, the job is pretty damn nice. I'm fully remote, good benefits, my supervisors don't micro manage my work, ~4 weeks of PTO, and as long as I get my work done and show up for meetings they really don't care when or where I work. The only downside is I only make ~$60k/year which is not great for an engineering job. Sadly, since I was fresh out of collage and it was the only place that sent me an offer after 400+ applications, I took it.
After a year working at the firm I was told it was time for annual raises and promotions. My company does most of their hiring, raises, and promotions around the same time to make it easier on everyone. I get a call from my office head and he told me after all the late hours I've worked, helping coworkers with projects, volunteering to assist on projects when people were on PTO, and not receiving a single complaint from a client or manager my raise was going to be…
Approximately 0.5% after accounting for inflation…..
To say I was pissed would be an understatement.
So I took a page from this sub and started looking for a new job while still doing the bare minimum. I updated my resume, asked a few trusted coworkers to be references, updated my LinkedIn profile, the whole shebang. So I have been casually looking at jobs for the last 3 months.
This week I got a call from my office head which was more than a little unsettling. He's a really nice guy and very easy to talk to but I have spoken to this man a grand total of 3 times before this call. Once was for him to tell me I didn't have enough billable hours on my timesheet and the other two were to tell me about my holiday bonus and my raise. I was a little freaked out and pretty much thought he was going to fire me since we just hired a new person on my team.
I hop on the call with him and he explained that the company was restructuring their hierarchy and career paths a bit. They realized they had hired a lot of new grads recently who had zero practical experience but were all making roughly the same amount of money as me. Which they decided was “unfair to the more experienced engineering team members.” To help correct this he said they were adding a “stepping-stone position” between my position and a senior level one (3-4 years of experience usually) to help differentiate between the experience levels. I was identified as one of those more experienced team members and was being promoted to this new position and it came with an 11% raise!!!
I am over the fucking moon ecstatic about this and still can't get over it!!! I think I'm going to put a pause on my job search and stick this one out for a while.
I know this might not fit with this sub's vibe but I just wanted to share my good news with y'all and spread a little positivity