As a newish person to the IT industry (2.5 or so years- but many more years in computing otherwise) I have gone from tier 1 tech support to Problem Management Software admin. During this time I have taught myself many things, developing with perl is one of them.

Throughout my various promotions here, I have always gone above and beyond. My supervisor, and her supervisor also have discovered that in addition to my willingness to do what it takes for the company, I also love to code.

As it stands (sorry, even though it is is gauche, it is relevant) i make slightly over 33k USD/year as an HOURLY employee in a 24/7 environ. Not a lot, particularly for my base job as it is. (I am willing to bet most of you agree to this.)

My company is switching help desk software, me and 3 others are doing the actual work, while outside implimenters are being contracted to design business flow. Cool. No big deal, except we are a 2800 tickets/day shop. Even more cause here for more money, at least I think so.

However it gets even better. Today my boss asked me to develop a web application that will let users look up tickets, create tickets, etc, etc. I was dumbstruck. Not only do I have to create this from scratch, with NO requirements, but I have to do this at my current pay rate. There is NO way this falls within my job description, and while I would LOVE doing it, do I?- but wait there's more!! In the same breath, I was asked to develop a database front end with - you guessed it- scanning support for a device line I know nothing about!

The question becomes, do I do what I love and develop these apps knowing I am being paid half of what the developers for these kinds of applications make? If I do let them exploit me like that, what stops them from doing it again? Am I being insubbordinate if I say no?

Help Monks, please. I am stuck. Badly.

In reply to Insubordination or Exploitation? by Silicon Cactus

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