Hey folks, just wanted to get this positivity out into the world.
Apologies for the formatting as I’m on mobile. So for some background: I went to a high CoL area to study Computer Science, stayed because I met someone very special to me, and ended up taking the first job offer in my field I could. For absolute peanuts. Average starting salary for entry level SEs is around 60-70k where I live, and I was making half that on an hourly wage of $17.50 an hour. With no benefits. And the work was all just writing boring scripts with no technical challenges in them. Pretty bad, but I figured I could tough it out and since I could put software engineer on my resume now, I figured I could get something better with a year of experience.
What I did not account for was the owner of the company being an absolute energy vampire.
Home dude was a grade A “my company is my kingdom, and in it I am the divinely ordained ruler” type. Genuinely said on multiple occasions, “I know everything that happens here”. Won’t answer questions if he thinks you don’t need to know the answer(like “when am I going to get a passcode to the building instead of using your smart lock app?”), won’t stop asking questions if he doesn’t like the answer you give. Once he came to my cubicle to chew me out about a form I had designed that was slightly miscolored, and I ended up having to explain to him how life works when you’re colorblind. He was also terrible about time off, constantly giving non answers when I would request days off, and once making me quarantine a week without working remotely because I had the gall to fly home to visit my parents for thanksgiving. This was because of the pandemic, which is fair, except he had forced us to return to the office months prior, so it was more about punishing me for requesting the time off on what he deemed too short notice(2 weeks, we had no major projects coming up). Also, I never did any work not on a computer, so there was no reason I couldn’t remote in for that week.
Anyway, this, understandably, made me want to leave. So I started applying for jobs, one of which was with a government agency, which required a background check. They ended up calling my boss and he FLIPPED. Came storming into my cubicle demanding to know when I was gonna put in my notice. After I explained to him that I wouldn’t get the job until after the background check was complete, he forced me to promise to give a MONTH of notice, or he was gonna fire me. So I did, and then after that he demanded to know how much they were talking about offering me.
Y’all, I really should’ve told him that was none of his business, but this man was so exhausting to deal with I just decided to be honest. I told him they were offering around $75k, and his snap response was, “You know, getting a 75k paying job is one thing, but keeping it is another.”
Now it was my turn to flip. I demanded to know if he was saying I was gonna get fired, which he gave some non answer for, and then when I asked him what he thought I was able to keep, salary wise, he replied, “well, more than you make now, but definitely not 75k.”
You can imagine how inspired I was in my job search then. Still, money was tight, and job searching is hard when you do have energy for it, so I was kinda stuck at the old job, hating it more and more. Finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore and said the right things to get myself fired(unsurprisingly over a time off request he waited until the last second to deny). All told, I stayed at that job for 1 year and 8 months. Got told I was unteachable and should consider a different industry on the way out the door. Naturally I wasn’t given a month notice for being fired. In fact, I wasn’t notified I was being fired until I came in for work the next day and my smart lock app didn’t have access.
After a period of rest, I kickstarted my job search and, late in February, started my new role as a developer at a big company!
For 90k. Plus health insurance, which my old job obviously didn’t provide. And a slew of other benefits.
We’re finishing up our second sprint, and no mention of me being on the chopping block. I’m learning things instead of doing grunt work, I’m fully remote, my team is awesome and the wlb is incredible. I make more than my old supervisor did(not the owner, but probably the person who does the most for him), and I’m living my best life while my ex-boss is still working 60 hour weeks and grinding up college students in that dilapidated fossil of a business.
In every conceivable way, this job is better. And I deserve that. And so do you.
TLDR: Boss told me I wasn’t worth 75k. Fired me. Now making 90k. Get bent John.