Threatening to quit for a raise tells me one of two things:
Either your fed up with your job and you really did want to move on.
Or two, your just after a raise and decided to use threats instead of acomplishments to receive it.
Either way I'd be looking for your replacement, hopefully with enough time for them to learn at least some of your responsibilities and/or systems you hav canged or created.
I keep track of what I work on throughout the year. Besides the ticket tracking system we have in place, I also have an installation of dotProject that I keep up to date with both projects I am working on and projects that have been mentioned that people would like to have (I classify anything with over a week of development as a project). At the end of the year I then have a high-level list of all of the projects I have worked on. Descriptions of the projects include whether it was directly requested from a superior or requested by someone else in the company and fit into our yearly goals.
Even a failed project is a selling point, as I don't allow projects to fail easily. For instance, I was recently working on an automation project that had almost no planning put into it. The project lead basically bought a bunch of equipment, gave a one page spec to a robotics company, then called in IT (6 months later) to make it all work. I won't outline all of the things tht went wrong with this project, I will only mention that I was forced to go above and beyond the call, often doing the work that others were supposed to have finished months before and had not yet started, in an attempt to start visibly working on my portions of the project (one of those tasks was actually defining what was needed from me). This project has failed, the final straw being that the one page spec outlined production rates that were about half our current production output and it was supposed to go live in
June July August September. But come end of year, despite the failure of the project, I will have a long list of very important tasks that I completed towards the project that will count very well in my favor, as I managed to take us out of the running for scapegoat and began changing that company's view (we're corporate) of what a good IT team is capable of.
I have managed small teams. I once was the Director of develeopment for a two man team at a small company. Currently I am in an environment that requires a large amount of self-management. Our managers handle high level communications, organization, some prioritizing, and clearing of roadblocks. I work on everything from ERP to EDI support, process controll software to legacy shopfloor management systems. I was the only employee of the company to get a mid-year bonus and plan on both a raise and a job title increase at the end of the year.
And to top it all off, I'm cynical, sarcastic, considered to be an ass, and not particularly likeable if your looking for me to find a way to let you do your job in a lazier fashion (there is an important difference between lazier and more efficient). Most people don't like me at first.
Despite my character flaws, I have never had to threaten for a raise.
