[iandouglas]

Missing is Aaron's base salary in this reply. 3% at different annual salaries can mean an awful lot to a lot of people.

As a manager, and also as someone who has done similar herculean efforts, it can be 'dangerous' to reward such efforts because it becomes the norm, you are expected to put in this kind of effort on a regular basis.

My take: if this guy was expected to spend three weeks completely rebuilding the architecture of a core system, then (a) his management layer sucks and he should have quit for that reason alone and I imagine that had more to do with the resulting layoffs later on, (b) retooling a system in three weeks of non-stop effort, even with minimal sleep is about 300-350 hours of work -- even spread out that's about 8-10 weeks of "regular" effort, which as a 20yr vet in the industry, doesn't sound like that complex of a system.

[tyingq]

Some years, the US cost of living increases more than 3%.

The Social Security Administration publishes numbers[1], although they are arguably somewhat lower than the actual COLA changes.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/colaseries.html