My old company fired me over a 15% raise. It ended up costing them 8x my salary.
I thought I'd share this story with you all, maybe it will give some of you a little hope or at least make you laugh a little.
I worked as a senior engineer for about 7 years at a mid-sized tech company you've probably heard of. I can't get into details, but the product was a heavily data-dependent platform, something like S3's object storage system. My job was to build and maintain its core data replication engine. For those in the field, imagine something like an eventually-consistent distributed hash table. I was the only one who understood it inside and out, because my old manager was negligent and never brought in a backup for me.
I discovered I was being paid about 15% less than the other senior engineers, so I asked for my salary to be matched with theirs. Management flatly refused. So I decided to match my effort to my pay, and I started working hours that suited me and stopped worrying about their rigid 'core hours' policy.
About six months ago, they brought in a new director. This guy fired my manager almost as soon as he arrived, so I started reporting directly to him. He called me into his new office and told me he'd heard I wasn't sticking to the 9-to-5 work schedule. I told him that was correct and explained the whole story. A few weeks later, he let me go, citing performance issues, which meant I got a severance package. When I asked why, he said that HR had flagged my timesheet for 'irregular work hours'.
I ran into an old colleague by chance a few days ago and got the latest news. It turns out that this director, and the VP who brought him in, were both fired. A huge reason for this is that they now need 8 people to do the work I was doing alone. Add my severance to that, and it's like they're paying the salaries of 9 people. And the best part? The system has become much more unstable, they've started losing major clients, and this has seriously spooked their investors.
They could have avoided all this nonsense if they had just given me that paltry 15% raise. Anyway, it's a great feeling to know that things sometimes work out the way they're supposed to. Honestly, I couldn't stop laughing when I heard.