I knew something was wrong the moment my boss asked me to stay late all week to train the woman taking over my job. But nothing prepared me for what HR told me: she’d be making $85,000 while I’d been earning $55,000 for the exact same role. When I asked why, HR simply said, “She negotiated better.” Something in me shifted. Instead of arguing, I smiled and agreed to train her.
The next day, my boss walked in to find two neatly labeled stacks on the desk: “Official Job Duties” and “Tasks Performed Voluntarily.” My replacement stared at the second stack, shocked by the amount of unpaid work I’d quietly been doing for years. The lesson had already begun.
During training, I stuck strictly to what was written in my job description. Nothing extra. No technical fixes, no crises, no cross-department negotiations. Whenever she asked how to handle escalations or system errors—the tasks I had always taken on—I simply said, “You’ll need to check with management. I was never officially assigned those.”
