Kinda

I am at this very moment living the days that so many of us only dream of. The joy of seeing people (who took your efforts, skills and work ethic for granted) genuinely struggle and suffer. The story: I having been working at my current company for 3 years now. I learnt everything about my process in my early days because I wanted to, and not because someone told me to. My early efforts made me very good at my job. This led to the manager to believe that my job is very easy. Cut to covid times, and all the core members except me had left the company. The manager hired all new peeps, and even a new TL. It was kinda insulting that they hired someone from outside to be my TL even though I had more experience in this process. During the lockdown, after giving all the new members initial training, I asked everyone to keep going through the code, this will raise many queries and to please bring those queries to my attention. During the 9-10 months I didn't receive even 1 query from any of them. They all had been basically enjoying their "honeymoon". Being paid for doing nothing. Still, I didn't mind, coz I was more in contact with my client than my manager. And I enjoyed the work. Problem began when the new TL started to "act like TL". He would join in on calls that didn't directly concern him. Ask me about updates on particular tickets which he didn't know anything about. He would speak out of turn in the daily stand-ups in front of clients, and then in private would try to pin it on me when he got an egg to the face for saying something stupid in the stand up. So, what none of them knew was I had been busy this whole lockdown upskilling. Got my AWS certificate"S", learnt and built practice projects on Spring and React. Cut to last month. I received an offer from a pretty big company with a 200% hike (because I was already being way underpaid according to industry standards). I issue my resignation, and my manager basically scoffs at me. His whole air was like "what you do isn't difficult, you're easily replaceable". A couple of weeks go by and I had been slowly taking myself out of the operations. Letting the other guys handle the client calls and work tickets. And then yesterday it happened. My manager calls me. Starts talking bs crap like how I have been holding up during the covid. Trying to make small talk. I test it like any other conversation and talk to him casually. After about 5 mins of pointless blabbering, he says, he'll counter the other offer and with a 20% hike. I politely declined it. Told him it's time for me to see the outside world. He ends the conversation abruptly in visible frustration. I have told my TL that I am happy to address any queries while I am still there. But the thing is, my notice period isn't long enough to cover the whole project(350k lines of code with a large chunk being legacy code, that has been there since 2008). And my TL knows it. I am just endlessly giggling internally seeing them struggle just to have a productive conversation with the client. The client is clearly getting frustrated, my manager is under pressure from the client to get the issues fixed and my TL is just in a very sad place. This makes me happy. It's sadistic, I know. But I am just a human. TL;DR Enjoyed my work. Made it look effortless. Manager thought my job is very easy. Was overlooked for promotion and never got a decent raise. Issued my resignation, now they're suffering trying to figure out how the hell I was doing it. Edit: MY GOD!! never thought my post would get this much attention. Everyone here has made me feel even happier. Edit: Addressing the other side. I see that some aren't as approving of my post as others. To them, I would like to say thank you for bringing the other side of the coin into perspective. I assure you all, my intention was never to put anyone in a difficult situation. I just took a better job, everything else just happened by consequence. I am sure the people who are negatively affected by my switch aren't intrinsicly bad people, but I also feel this was a lesson they all had to learn someday.