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Ahh, the friendly sibling of: “My co-worker accidentally became important at work, and they laid them off, now my life is ruined”
Samesies.
I used to be a programming monkey. It was absolutely fine, I enjoyed it and other people got the flak if things weren’t done on time or there were other problems. My code was never the problem - each day, I spent at least four hours working for the company and up to four hours on my own projects, on the company dime.
Seems like I got too… confident in meetings. Made suggestions. People took too much notice.
Now I’m some kind of lead architect which pays really well, but there’s no more time for myself, there’s much more pressure, I can’t code nearly as much as I want to and the fun is gone.
Confidence in meetings and paying attention is like a death punch to the face made of money. It happened to me too.
Worse, you become important but with no pay raise
Then it becomes all pain no gain
That’s called leverage. “Oh you don’t want the only person who knows how to do X to quit? Sounds like a you problem.”
That one has a simple answer:
If they are not paying you, they don’t consider you important, simple as that.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.
I would say if they’re not paying you what you’re worth then there’s a few possibilities:
- You are less important than you think you are
- You think you are less important than you are
- They just underpay everyone and don’t care if you leave
That’s why I’m leaving.
EDIT:
The important guy before me already left and I already see the next one.Minus: You’ll never get promoted because no one else can do that job
Plus: You’ll never get laid off for the same reason
Never underestimate the ability for middle management to not know how important you actually are.
Shit, sometimes they’ll lay you off just because you are worth too much and cost too much money.
Or just do RTO
The trick is to use your PTO all at once and be out for a week or so - everything falls over and it reminds your boss how you’re the only thing keeping it all together.
The key to a good career in IT is to not have everything run too smoothly. If your systems have 100% uptime, it’s easy for people to forget that you exist and are needed. The occasional bug reminds them that their lives would collapse without you.
