Ha! I did something like that for a company, in this case. Their core app was slow and not scaling and they were failing SLAs, I was doing sysadmin work then and not on the dev team then but I dove into the code base, found the bug fixed it, increased speed by 3000%. They had tons of DB clients inserting one row at a time to the DB. Batched them. Company went nuts everyone was happy since this has been hunting the business for months, VP came into the office and gave me a high five. CEO sent me a thanks email. Then economy shrank and pay raise was frozen. I got $0 after performance review which was excellent a few months later. My boss at that time dipped into his pocket and gave me a $100 gift card to Best Buy. I bought a VCR, VCR then was $120. :-D