HR refuses to give developer raise by downplaying their work, forced to eat their words when their software stops working

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Sep 26, 2024 6:00 PM EDT

It's common knowledge that you'll often never be appreciated for your job when things are going well—or even great. Your boss and employer assume your high performance is just a given and merit to their management rather than a credit to your own talent and efforts. But, as soon as something goes wrong, they won't blame themselves, even though that will make the most sense based on their logic. No, they'll suddenly come around asking questions, trying to figure out what went wrong, and looking to finger you with the blame. Sorry, if you don't know how to fix the issue, why were you taking credit in the first place?

This is especially true in any role, like IT and software development, where you're paid to ensure that nothing goes wrong. As long as nothing is visibly going wrong, the C-suite suits are probably sitting there wondering what the heck they're paying you for. But, as soon as something goes wrong, they'll suddenly be well reminded.

When this HR department refused to give their developer a raise, downplaying their work and arguing that their bug fixes and improvements weren't delivering anything that "actually mattered," they decided that if delivering new projects and features were the only thing that mattered for their role, well, then that's what they'd be focusing on. And when things stopped working properly, guess who was the first to complain?

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