My coworker quit and now I am the only one who knows how to keep the entire legacy backend from imploding. How do I turn this into a raise without looking like I am holding them hostage?
So my senior lead dev put in his two weeks notice about a month ago and now I am basically the only person left who understands how the logic flow actually works in our main legacy system. We are talking about a massive spaghetti monster that has been built over eight years with zero documentation and a lot of hacky fixes that somehow kept us afloat during the last high traffic season. When he left everyone just shrugged it off like it was no big deal but now every single bug or minor update falls on my desk and my slack notifications are basically a war zone from 8am to 10pm. The mangement team seems to think that becuse the site is still running everything is fine and I can just absorb his entire workload without any compensation change because we are a family or whatever corporate nonsense they are pushing this week.
The reality is that if I decided to walk out tomorrow or even just took a sick week the entire production enviornment would probably catch fire within forty eight hours because no one else even knows where the config files are stored or how the CI pipelines are actually triggered manually when the auto scripts fail. I am currently doing the job of two and a half people while still getting paid my original mid level salary and it is starting to get old really fast. I know I have a lot of leverage right now but I do not want to come across as a total jerk who is shaking the company down the second things get difficult even though that is exactly what they deserve for not having a backup plan. I need to figure out how to frame this as a market adjustment or a lead role promotion instead of just saying pay me more or watch the servers melt.
I have been trying to document things but honestly there is so much technical debt that it would take me six months of doing nothing else just to get a decent wiki started and they keep piling on new feature requests like we have a full team. I am reaching my breaking point because I am tired of being the only person who gets paged at 3am for things that I did not even write in the first place. It feels like I am being punished for being competent enough to figure out Mike's mess while everyone else just stays in their little silos and ignores the fire. If I go to my manager and ask for a thirty percent bump he is going to say it is not in the budget but we both know that hiring a contractor to replace me would cost them triple that and it would take months for a new guy to even find the login credentials for the db.
There has to be a way to navigate this without burning bridges because I actually like the product but I hate the way the workload has shifted. Maybe I should just stop fixing the minor stuff and let a few non critical systems fail so they see what happens when I am spread too thin. It is just annoying that I have to play these games just to get paid fairly for the actual value I am providing to the stack. I am just tired of the constant fire drills and the lack of recognition for being the literal glue holding the infra together right now. My coffee is cold and I have three more tickets to close before I can even think about lunch.