All your boss told you was that if they could, they would pay you less.

All hard work gets you is more work.

I had a boss tell me this and it was because he couldn't unlock the right budget bucket to pay me more unless I first indicated a documentable fact that I was leaving. Apparently his hands were tied above him...so I did it. I actually didn't have a job lined up, but gave my two weeks, got a 20% raise...and then still left 6mos later for greener pastures.

But my rapport with my boss was pretty good at the time, so it was pretty clear when he said what he said that there was reason.

When I left my old job, a lowly shipping/receiving guy in a warehouse, my job panicked and offered me a pretty significant raise if I stayed.

After having been there about 5 years, I'd made myself somewhat indispensable, they kind of just kept piling responsibilities onto me, I absorbed a lot of a supervisors duties when he retired with no replacement hired for him, I had fairly minimal oversight and was mostly left to figure out how things worked on my own (which I didn't really mind, it made the job more interesting and I was up to the task, but I definitely didn't get paid nearly enough for the work I was doing) so I was pretty much the only one who knew how all of our shipping and receiving stuff worked.

Along the way I wrangled myself a couple OK raises, but not really enough to bring me to a proper living wage. I had asked a couple of times about at least getting a promotion in title if nothing else so that I would have something more impressive on my resume that "warehouse associate" which I'm pretty sure was my job title the entire time I was there despite effectively being a supervisor.

When they offered me more when I told them I was leaving, it pissed me off more than anything. If they'd just paid me that much from the get-go and kept on top of giving me decent raises to reflect the job I was doing there's a good chance I'd still be working there now and never would have tried looking for another job. What they offered me wasn't quite my starting salary at my new job but it was pretty close.

I could have left them really high and dry and just left, but I didn't want to screw over whoever was replacing me too badly, so I wrote down instructions for everything I could think of that was my responsibility because honestly no one else had the whole picture, a handful of people there could do parts of my job but a lot of it, like I said, was stuff I had to figure out on my own. All of the business cards I'd acquired for different shipping companies, vendors, etc. and I gave 3 weeks notice and attempted to pass on as much knowledge as possible to my likely temporary replacement before I left. Last I heard, they went through several replacements within a few months of me leaving.

Don't let it piss you off. S/he just told you how to get a raise. Go get your raise.

At a previous job where I had basically become the manager of my manager and held my department together, I spent 3 months just trying to get a meeting with the guy who had the power to give me a raise.

In that time I found another job and put in my two weeks, my new job paid 90k but for shits and giggle I told them I was getting 130 and asked if they could do any better, they immediately came back with 110 which was almost worse since I was only initally asking for 80. I said no and went on to my new job which was 110% the right call.

Shortly after that they announced that they were selling the company, I heard from my old manager that the sale went through but in the mix that had to drop a good chunk of their clients from my old department (the most profitable one) since I was the only one there who knew how to handle a majority of the work and the only reason they could bring them on was me. I don't know how it all worked out but the old owner got sued for fudging numbers and is now the current owner.

Last I heard they fumbled keeping my department alive and all of my coworkers got layed off along a lot of other people and the company's not doing so hot.

Throw me a bone, it costs you NOTHING.

Well I hope you expect more then NOTHING for your raise..........

That being said, I always find if interesting how companies assign value. I would guess based on past experience that you got some sort of "atta-boy(mam)" but someone higher up gets the bonus for the $1/2 million saved a year.