A little over a year and a half ago, I applied for an internal position two levels higher than my previous position. During the interview, I asked what the salary was and was told $78K. I was making about $25K less than that so I was ecstatic (although I played it cool).
A week or two later, the recruiter called me to offer the position and mentioned that the pay would be 15% increase from my old pay which equals $62K. I accepted because I (stupidly) felt like I had no other choice. I have a feeling my boss wasn't supposed to tell me the $78K number so I didn't want to screw up a professional relationship by throwing him under the bus. I am guessing the $78K number was the mid-range for the position since later the boss told me my predecessor wasn't even making that much.
Fast forward about a year and my boss and fellow analyst co-worker are laid off leaving me as the only person in my sub-department. A few months later and with a new boss (although I'm the only semi-experienced one in my specific area), raises come out from our annual reviews and the "whole company" received 1.5%. Since we just had layoffs, I figured asking for a larger raise would be a miscalculation. Can you tell I'm an introvert? :-P
Fast forward 6 months later - I am still doing the job of two people plus also being my own tech support for a very unstable database. I have to be very careful with when I take any PTO because of the database. Any breakdown or missing data from me not being around takes a long time to fix (even with backups) and this wasn't the job I was hired to do (although I would never say that).
The largest issue with being tech support for half my time is that it is hard for me to show much value but i suppose since no one else can run this database, that is value.
So is asking for a raise a good idea and how much would be a good range to have in mind? I assume it would still be a bad idea to mention the $78K number because even though the old boss is not with the company, my new boss worked with him for over a decade and I don't want to be throwing blame around.
