Worker Pens Blistering Resignation Letter After Finding Out New Hires They Were Training Were Making $40K More Than Them

There's nothing more infuriating that finding out you're being paid less than coworkers doing the same job as you. But coworkers underneath you? Well, that's a whole extra level of egregious. 

So when one professional discovered this is exactly the situation they were trapped in at their job, they got right to work getting even. 

The worker learned he was being paid tens of thousands of dollars less than new hires he's training and mentoring.

The person has deleted their original Reddit post to the r/antiwork subReddit, but their outrage is palpable even in the post's title alone: "Found out new starters (I was mentoring and leading) were being paid €40k [$43,579] more than me," they wrote.

Situations like this are becoming increasingly common given the persistent and widespread labor shortages in all kinds of employment sectors — managers increase salaries to attract talent, leaving tenured employees making less than newbies, a process called pay compression.

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There is, of course, an easy way to handle this with integrity: to bump up tenured employees, or at least honor their requests for a raise when they find out about pay compression. But that is, unsurprisingly, not what this person's bosses chose to do.

"Management told me there was nothing they could do," he wrote, which is a lie, since they just hired a slew of people at huge salaries.

After finding out he was being paid less than new hires, he resigned and made his departure as painful as possible for his bosses.

"Started interviewing externally," the person wrote, and as often happens nowadays, he "got an offer for €60k more" for the same job he was already doing. How's that for coming out on top?

Naturally, the next step was to tender his resignation and make his exit — and he did so with about as much respect as he was shown by his bosses.

His letter of resignation, screenshots of which have been circulated around the internet as seen below, begins in the usual way — "please take this as immediate notice of my resignation" — before making a hard left into "take this job and shove it" territory.

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Photo: @f--kyouiquit / Twitter

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"As threatened," the letter reads, which is about the best way to open a sentence in a letter of this kind a person could possibly think of, "I have found a job externally who are prepared to pay me a fair market value." He then declared he would be using his remaining three weeks of PTO effective immediately before going for the jugular.

"Good luck training my replacement," he wrote. "I will not be writing a handover doc. The pay discrepancy in this role is a disgrace and you should be ashamed of yourself." For anyone who's ever been taken advantage of at a job, this is standing ovation material, for sure. 

Pay compression is an increasingly common problem, and people applauded this worker for not tolerating it.

A 2022 analysis by HR company Robert Half found that 56% of companies it surveyed were experiencing pay compression, sometimes also called wage compression, due to labor shortages and the competitive hiring markets. On the employee side, 62% surveyed said they planned to ask for a raise within the next year.

If you find yourself falling victim to pay compression and want to make the case for being paid more, experts suggest researching the current fair market value for someone in a job like yours with your level of experience and credentials. Then, present that data to your superiors with a request that they match it.

Hopefully, they have the fairness and integrity to hear you out, unlike this Redditor's employer. But if not and you decide to go scorched-earth like he did, you certainly won't be alone.

Robert Half found that more than one-quarter of those planning to ask for more money were planning to bail on their current employer as soon as they find a new job, which only worsens the company's labor shortage problems, all because they didn't want to pay fairly.

As Mo'nique famously put it, "When you do clownery, the clown comes back to bite." 

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John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.