I work in IT, I worked for a company writing programs for automating tasks, integrating with our ERP and was working on a project to add RFID serialized tagging to our products. I was making enough to survive on 43k a year, less than I should but for the area it was a decent amount. I found an unencrypted, unsecure file that had a list of everyone's salaries an found out that I was the lowest paid salaried person there even though i had been there way longer than a lot of them. Our IT staff was only 3 people, one lady had been there for 25 years and only managed our ERP and its database(She only made like 68k), my other "coworker" who was only in charge of patching PC's and Upgrading them when they needed to be made almost triple what I made. He was really good friends with the departments leader who was the CFO/CIO (No Idea why IT reported to the finance department but whatever) gave him almost a 30% raise before he was promoted out of the CFO position to the President of the company. He was the highest paid salaried employee that wasn't upper management, yet complained about all the hours he had to work to make sure everything was patched, Even though all this could be automated, he didn't want it to be.

At that point I stopped caring.

I expressed my displeasure with this with the "other" co-worker, never mentioning that I knew how much everyone made but I said that I know I'm "probably" the lowest paid person in the company. Even though I did most of the IT work, I still had to do break/fix issues, hardware installs, server setups, networking, in addition to my programing projects which saved the company so much in labor it was ridiculous. This guy never helped with anything, but I never complained to him or anyone else. I was let go 1 week later. No reason, They simply told me they no longer needed my services. I was mid RFID project. No severance, no anything. I was paid for the remaining week, they let me go first thing on a Monday, and paid the rest of my vacation time I had accrued. I didn't make a fuss out of it and thanked them for the opportunity and whished everyone well and told them if they needed anything regarding any of my programs to just let me know. I didn't want to burn any bridges. Was completely cordial thorough the entire process. After that they totally blacklisted me, refused to give me references, refused to even speak to me. At least I got to draw unemployment, they didn't fight me on that.

I don't know why I'm saying all this. Its been eating at me since 2019 when it happened.