Short summary of my previous job.
I work IT for a non-profit who of course uses that as an excuse to pay way below the median. I'm 1 of 4 on an IT team that supports 800+ users over 30+ buildings and this is expanding every month.
I have been there over 5 years and have been promoted over the years to a Jr. Sys Admin role. However, because we have such few help desk staff (2 of the 4 are designated as help desk), I still do basic help desk as 80% of my job and even the Sr. Sys Admin has to do support probably 25% of the time.
I can see things getting worse so I started to casually look for a new job. After only a couple weeks, I found a job and was offered a position for basic help desk (which is fine since that's mostly what I do anyways), but for a 25% pay increase, hourly classification instead of salaried exempt, a nice matching 401k , and 4 day wfh indefinitely.
I handed in my resignation to the IT Director to which she was surprised as I never mentioned I was ever thinking of leaving. Later that day my Sr. Sys Admin texts me basically telling me the director is freaking out and not sure how they will replace me and she also is worrying about losing him now too.
I'm approaching my final days here and I've really seen things unfold from the meetings the Director has had with the Sr. Sys Admin.
They originally would start the basic help desk employees at around 26k and didn't want to budge on that because they believe any kid who lives in their mom's basement can do IT. It took us years to finally hire a 2nd help desk person about 2 years ago and any time we brought up the fact that 4 IT staff for that many users, systems and locations is not normal, they would brush it off.
When I resigned I told them a bit about where I was going and the environment and they finally go “Hmm if that's the real expectation of IT support staff to users, maybe we can look at hiring more staff in the future.” We've been saying that for years!!!
For my replacement, they wanted to say the job needed 3+ years experience and a bachelors but not pay over 40k. (Because that's what I made upon leaving and they can't dream of paying someone brand new more money).
After a few meetings with my boss and realizing that losing my knowledge I had of the specialized systems and back-end stuff there, they went from “We need to change his job posting to requiring a BA and we don't want to pay more than 40k” to now they bumped the lowest help desk people 5k starting, are adding 2 more help desk positions, and seem to being paying my old position over 40k (Which is still VASTLY underpaid). They are also going to offer my old boss more money because they are scared to lose him.
My boss is pretty upset because he relied on me for a lot of the day to day operations and they wouldn't believe us for YEARS when we said that a team of 4 IT staff to support as many users and buildings as we did is not sustainable.
Instead of offering me more money or wanting to offer me any sort of WFH indefinitely (which they won't because “it's not part of our companies culture”), they are going to find someone new because they won't come up to my new job offer and they can get someone brand new for less. They even offered my boss the ability to contract out some IT work if they department is really that overburdened with some projects. (Always fun to hear the employer is willing to pay a contractor money to do a job instead of increasing their current staff's salary or add onto the team).
He's thinking of leaving within the next year as well at which point the company will be completely screwed since no one knows that back-end besides him and myself.
Why does it take a valuable employee leaving to finally realize and listen that the department is understaffed and underpaid?