I've been with my company for 3.5 years. I came with no experience, learned quickly, exceeded expectations and got promoted multiple times to get into my current role.
Most recently I was hired on as part of a 3 man team when the official “senior” of our team was promoted to assistant manager and an outside employee was hired to her vacant role. She came with quite a few years of experience from a larger company to ours.
I had been in my non-senior role for a year when it was decided our team would grow to 4 people and they wanted the 4th person to be another “senior”. My AM approached me and told me to apply and I was given the role. I received a 10% pay raise from my regular, non senior salary.
The more experienced senior has been struggling with her workload since Spring and it was no secret she couldn't catch up. I on the other hand am killing it and was named a top performer, not just in our little team but also our counterpart teams included, last quarter. I hit my matrix goals every quarter, handle all my files with habitual accuracy and generally get shit done. Before joining this team I was named a quarterly top performer 3 other times. Your reward for this is department wide accolades and about $20 worth of Amazon swag.
We work in tasks and everyday I work my tasks down to less then 20 and some days less then 5. My counterpart has been unable to get under 75 to 100 tasks since April
I assumed that due to her experience and the year of which she was the only senior, she just has more complicated files to work and that I was being babied along.
This week she announced she's leaving for another company. I reached out to her to ask her about her salary because I knew we were not paid equal and I have a feeling I was going to be asked to take on her complicated files that are still being worked. Turns out she was hired in at almost 8k more than I was offered to take the role and after last Spring's merit increase currently makes $10k more than me.
I approached my AM offline and told her I'd be happy to take on the more complicated files that my counterpart was working but that I wanted to be paid a salary more comparable to my counter-part's.
I was told we had the same job and received the same type of files. She is paid her rate based on her experience and I was paid my rate based on my lack of experience. I was told there probably wasn't anything I could expect until next Spring's merit increase.
I pushed back and said that with her leaving and the length of time required to recruit, hire and train a backfill I was likely going to shoulder a significant burden, that coupled with my performance record I would like to at least have some consideration.
She agreed I need a raise and we'll talk about it next week over lunch but no promises for anything immediate.
All this aside, I feel like I'm an asshole.
Why should I feel like an asshole for asking to be fairly paid? Why am I getting paid significantly less when I'm swimming circles around the experienced people?
I guess I don't expect an answer I'm just annoyed with myself for feeling like I did something wrong while also feeling justified in sticking up for myself.