Here is a little bit of my background employment history. For 4 years, I worked in a manual labor job that paid very well but was destroying my body. I was fed up and quit December 2019 in the middle of a shift. In February 2020, I got a job in Information Technology. I started at the end of February 2020, and then in March 2020, the pandemic shut everything down. I was able to work from home the whole time. The only bad thing about it was the huge paycut I took; however, I figured I could work my way back.
The new company I worked for provided IT services to multiple clients in various industries or organizations in the public sector. We provided 1st level help desk support to our clients' staff. We worked 10 hour shifts taking call after call from start to finish. I enjoyed the work being a tech, but there wasn't much opportunity to excel. We followed knowledge base articles and there wasn't much deviation allowed. To further summarize, we would spend on average 10 to 15 minutes per call, and often times, with the tools and directions given techs were unable to resolve the issue. We would escalate the ticket to the client's internal IT team.
This was by design. We were a cost center and not a cost multiplier. We were frontline to absorb the abuse and workload so our client's internal IT could work the tickets at their leisure. My job just hired bodies and had high turnover.
Despite this, I maintained a high degree of professionalism. I have excellent customer service and tech skills. I drafted thoroughly detailed tickets that rarely got kickbacked from the client's IT. I was rated almost every month as the top tech. I got a $0.30/hour raise in the middle of my first year. I would get no further raises even though the job advertised that the top of the range was $5.00/hour higher than what they paid me. There was also no cost of living raise. They would also revise(lower) the top end of their range after I asked about it enough times.
I would have left sooner, but the pandemic made things uncertain. Fortunately, I did have PTO for the first time, and after a year of banking it, I used it to take a shift or two off every week or every other week. Sometime in June 2021, after my PTO was exhausted, I started job searching. On top of that, I put in a request for a pay raise and a promotion fully knowing I would get neither.
Each week, sometimes once or twice a week, I would ask my boss for an update. I would also ask my boss's boss, too. They fed me a ton of exscuses. Then, I started openly talking about pay raises in our work chat and sending private messages to coworkers lamenting about the lack thereof. Unbeknowst to them, I secretly got a lot of enjoyment from doing these things.
Near the end of July 2022, I started getting interviews. The very first interview was for a network operation center that offered higher pay and was just about better in every way than my current job. A week after the interview, I got a job offer that paid about $5.00/hour more. Then, Thursday before the Labor Day weekend I got my offer letter with a start date the Tuesday after Labor Day.
This was perfect. All the remaining senior techs beside myself had recently left. The company had churned through training a bunch of new hires. I was scheduled Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then the Tuesday after Labor Day. Weekends were not an easy shift and definitely not for new hires, and for several of those hours I was the only tech scheduled. It was something like 1 hour into my 10 hour shift that Thursday. I drafted and sent a simple and professional email stating my immediate resignation and what time I clocked out. I sent it to my boss and boss's boss. Then I clocked out.
Couple hours later, I was at our apartment's pool with my wife enjoying a good drink or two. I checked my phone and saw I got some voicemails. Guess who they were from? They begged me to come back and that my pay raise was effective immediately – $1/hour higher than what they were paying me. I spent the Labor Day weekend at the pool.
I've been at my current job for almost a year now. I love it, I've gotten a decent raise and then a promotion with an even nicer raise. I use to live in a shithole apartment, but now I can afford to live in a decent apartment. I make more than any other job I've ever had and am considering with my significant other of having a child. Also, I plan on quitting and looking for that next better job or higher pay raise.