She’d worked at her company for three years, long enough to recognize early on that it was a toxic workplace with high turnover throughout the organization, even though her own department had stayed relatively stable and she genuinely liked the people she worked alongside. She’d pushed through long hours and a fully in person requirement, making it work despite the environment around her.
After outgrowing her original role, she’d moved into a different position within the company rather than leaving altogether, a much better fit that came with significantly more responsibility attached to it. Her team was small, just her and her boss handling this particular job, and her boss was constantly overwhelmed. She’d put real effort into keeping things running smoothly under that pressure.
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The Raise That Never Materialized
The problem was that her salary never changed when she moved into the new role, staying exactly where it had been despite the added responsibility. She recognized in hindsight that she should have negotiated pay at the time of the move, but the company had a culture of expecting people to absorb extra responsibility first and prove their worth before compensation followed, which meant asking upfront wasn’t really how things worked there.
In January, after about two and a half years with the company and roughly a year in her new role, she finally asked to be paid appropriately for the position, requesting an increase of about $15,000. Her direct boss supported the request. By July, six months later, nothing had actually happened, with every update reduced to some version of “we’re working on it.” The decision sat entirely with the department director and HR at that point, completely outside her boss’s control, and everyone around her knew she’d been waiting months without an answer.
The Offer That Changed Everything
Eventually she started applying elsewhere and landed an offer from a large, well known company in the area. The new role was hybrid, fully staffed, and paid $13,000 more than she’d even asked her current employer for, translating to a $28,000 increase over her existing salary. Given six months of stalled promises against an offer that outpaced her original request by a wide margin, the decision to move forward wasn’t a difficult one to make.
When she gave her notice, her boss’s reaction caught her completely off guard. The first thing her boss said was that she could’ve given a heads up. Her boss went on to explain that if she’d known about the job search, she wouldn’t have let this happen, that there would have been time to hire someone more senior before her boss went on maternity leave in a few months, and that she felt personally hurt not to have been told directly first.
The Counteroffer That Came Too Late
Her boss claimed she would have pushed harder with the director and HR to get the raise approved, or even tried to arrange a hybrid setup despite the company’s consistently strict in office policy. All of that came only after the resignation was already on the table, not during the six months the raise request had already been sitting untouched.
She responded that she didn’t think it was standard practice to tell a boss about a job search before actually resigning. Her boss kept pushing back, insisting that things were different because it was her specifically, and that she wouldn’t have fired her over it. At one point her boss even took a jab at her, asking whether she’d never asked for a raise before this situation, a comment that shifted blame onto her for the pay gap rather than acknowledging the six months of inaction that had actually led to this point.
Why the Timing Argument Doesn’t Hold Up
The idea that advance notice of a job search would have changed the outcome runs into an obvious problem, the raise request had already been sitting unresolved for six months before any job search even started. If a $15,000 increase already approved by her direct boss couldn’t get finalized by the director and HR in that time, there’s little reason to believe a warning about active job hunting would have accelerated that same stalled process any faster.
The maternity leave timeline, the promise to fight harder for the raise, the offer of a hybrid arrangement despite years of strict in office policy, all of it surfaced only once she was already walking out the door with a competing offer in hand. That timing suggests the flexibility existed the entire time, it just never got extended until leaving became the only alternative on the table.
Whether Giving a Heads Up Is Actually Standard
Job hunting while employed is common practice, and keeping that search private from a current employer until a resignation is finalized is the norm, not the exception. Employers generally don’t expect advance warning about a job search precisely because that information can create exactly the kind of workplace tension her boss displayed, treating an employee differently, rushing to fill a role, or souring the relationship well before any actual decision has been made.
There’s also a practical risk to disclosing a job search early, since an employer forewarned about a departure could choose to let someone go on their own timeline rather than the employee’s, particularly in a workplace already known for high turnover and instability. Waiting until an offer was signed and a decision was final was the standard, lower risk approach, not an unusual breach of some unwritten rule.
Where This Leaves Her
She declined any discussion of a counteroffer since her decision was already made, and she was walking away from a $28,000 increase along with a hybrid arrangement at a fully staffed company, terms that dramatically outpaced anything her current employer had offered across six months of stalled negotiation. Her boss’s reaction, framed around personal hurt and missed communication, sidestepped the much simpler explanation for why this happened, that a supported raise request had been allowed to sit untouched for half a year with no real urgency behind it until it was too late to matter.
The comment about never asking for a raise before this situation added an extra layer of blame shifting onto her, ignoring both the company culture that discouraged asking upfront and the six months her boss herself had spent watching the approved request go nowhere without escalating it further on her own.
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