Once, years and years ago, the company fired a coworker of mine with 2 weeks to go before their deadline with Keller Williams, a massive realtor in the USA. (I’m pretty sure at this point it’s the largest.)
We had a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal with them.
The company fired the developer, leaving us in the lurch and came to me to save the day.
No, we couldn’t ask for more time. Sorry, two weeks was all we had, we’d made promises, and if we didn’t deliver, we were fucked.
So I killed myself for that project. Even though they’d fired my friend, I felt like saving a multi-million dollar contract would lead to some kind of reward. Like even if they dropped ten grand on me! That’s nothing in the scope of a big multi-million dollar contract, right?
So I slept in the office, worked weekends, you name it, and we made our deadline.
I’m called into the office later by my boss, who hands me an envelope and has a gleam in his eye.
“You did a great job, so we wanted to send you some appreciation.”
I opened up the envelope.
It was a $50 Target card.
I was kind of stupefied for a moment. They’d asked me to do something impossible. No one else could have possibly pulled that off, even with 80 hour work weeks and sleeping at the office, it was impossible, and I’d somehow done it.
Tens of millions of dollars annually, guaranteed for five years, and I’d saved the contract.
I looked up at my boss with the card in my hand.
The gleam was still in his eye as he said, “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
I almost committed horrible violence that day.
But that day I also aggressively began sending out resumes to other companies.
And I gained a piece of wisdom:
The company will never love you back.
Never.
Edit: Yes, I did get out of there and get a better job a couple weeks later.