Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

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I worked at a savings and loan back during the 1988/1989 crisis that took them out and we were no different. Hired as a 'C' programmer I was quickly turned into a Sybase DBA, sys-admin and anything else I could handle. In fact I ended up writing an in-house payroll system so like you I had inside information.

When the sys-admin left I asked for a raise since I was doing his job and my own. They made some excuses about his better education (he was a few hours away from his PhD in music) and the fact the company was under FDIC control.

I found a new job at a local oil company but contracting: my new salary was more than double what the bank laid. My bosses exact words when I quit were "Oh, shit" because he knew all along he'd been screwing me and he was never going to get a programmer/DBA/UNIX sys-admin for $27k/yr.

He asked if he could make a counter offer it was with great satisfaction I was able to reply "Vick, I now make more than you do. What's your counter offer?"

I had a similar experience. I was brought on as a junior fresh out of university and quickly made a name for myself in the company, I wasn't the top developer by any means, but after a few years and a couple of pay rises, the £32k/year they were paying me (in central London) was definitely much lower than what I should have been getting.

One of my colleagues had the year before, and had recently got funding for his startup. He offered myself and another developer a job, so we went to tell our boss together who obviously wasn't too pleased. He then spoke to us separately about negotiations, and he offered me £55k/year. The look on his face when I said "Sorry, but they are offering me much more than that" was priceless.

A few years later (after all the team I'd worked with had left) I went back to what was left of the company as a contractor for a few months. I was earning more per week, than I was per month, when I first started.

Oh, the joys of sticking it to a particularly evil boss. I got this exact same satisfaction when I left my job working on sounding rockets. The boss was a micromanager who was eventually demoted (and then left the company) after I left, because he had driven away more than half his department.

Two days before I left, he had been threatening, in a roundabout way, to fire me. But when I handed in my resignation letter, he was eager to keep me and asked what it would take to keep me. I named the salary my next job was offering. "You'll make more than I do now!" he said.

This line makes my day: "Vick, I now make more than you do. What's your counter offer?"

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