Here's a blatant example. I used to work for a small company providing worker's comp management that had been doubling its earnings year on year for over 7 years. It had grown, in 18 years, from being in the owner's garage to a $100 million dollar company that was building its second free-standing building. That company truly had an advantage over its competitors, and that advantage was its IT. The DBA was a 26yr old who had joined the company out of school right when it switched from Progress to Oracle. He had built every database they had and managed them expertly. Right around the time I took another position, he asked for a raise from $52k to $60k. He figured that a company earning $100M should be able to throw an extra $8k to the sole DBA, especially given that he had an offer in hand for $65k as a junior DBA at another company - more pay and less work. He was told that the best he could get would be $56k. Obviously, he walked. Now, the company has paying $120/hr to someone who had to learn why the databases were structured the way they were for over a year. Needless to say, that company has squandered its edge over its competitors.

Interesting story -- and a sad one, too.

I wonder how the DBA tried to sell his $8k raise, what salary he started with, or how his annual raises progressed. Because it seems to me he had a dynamite job, and with the right sales pitch could have been making a six figure salary. And the company is now paying for trying to save a $4k raise.

Something similar happened to me -- I was the lone developer left from a development team of a dozen, making $34K. When my boss announced he was leaving, the owner called me into the bosses office and asked me how much I was making. I told him, and he immediately gave me a raise to $40K, to give me incentive to stay.

It worked -- I stayed another two years, and was able to support and even add a few features to his desktop publishing product (Laser Friendly's The Office Publisher, if any of you remember the late 80's). So, for an additional $6k per year, over about a 2 1/2 year period, he bought continued technical support for a cranky old scotch-taped togther piece of code written in Turbo Pascal. Without it, he would have been stuck with a piece of code going nowhere.

This should be a lesson to business owners: don't leave yourself too thin when it comes to crucial business IT infrastructure. Maybe your DBA's being a prima donna -- but do you want to ignore their request for a raise? Better to get someone cross-trained on the database, and then ease the troublemaker out.

$120/hour, 2_000 hours in a year makes $240K -- and after all that, this person's finally up to speed. Oops.