The confounding variable is that there's several factors that make this more awkward:

* I have yet to see my PM in the flesh, haven't met with the CEO or treasurer (they're married) in a business setting since the job interview (although I do see them from time to time because of their daughter), have yet to communicate directly with the CEO (it happens through the PM...although I guess this is to be expected), and communication with the treasurer is...sparse. I email him my timesheet once a month, and I emailed him about the first raise. I also emailed him when I stupidly broke the LCD on the company laptop...but he didn't write back, so after a week I just replaced the screen myself (on my own dime (but I'm willing to take responsibility for that--it was my fault) (speaking about my own dime, I also bought a second AC adapter and working battery since I travel a fair bit...I wonder what'll happen to them when I quit and presumably turn the laptop back in)).

* I do email my PM frequently--I don't work in a vacuum--but he's absolutely not the person to talk to about HR-y kind of stuff.

* I have a very loose idea of how my work helps the company make money. There's the flagship software which I worked on over the summer, and I believe a version was custom-made and sold to the government. But there's also a utility that I've been working on this year, and for which I'm the sole developer. I've put a lot of work into it, and it has many more features and a much cleaner (and well-documented) codebase now. But I have yet to have any kind of interaction--directly or indirectly--with a (potential) customer.

* I learned indirectly that they're actually stretched rather thin financially. That shouldn't change my value as a programmer, but realistically it means that they probably wouldn't be super-enthusiastic about doubling someone's wage.

If things were a bit more--I hate this word, but I'll use it anyway--chummy, I'd feel comfortable mentioning that I thought I was being underpaid, and if not then how could I improve? But there's really no opportunities for incidental conversations.

So I'm thinking my plan is to discretely line up another, better job, and then say something to the effect of this, except more polite, "I'm very happy that I spent last summer making programs and not cheeseburgers--thank you very much--but Programming is Hard (tm) and something a shade above minimum wage is inadequate. I've been offered a position at Company X which has much more reasonable compensation, so unless you're willing to top it, this is my two weeks' notice."

--

Unfortunately Pidgin's not in the GSoC this year. (Isn't it in Python? That would've been fun...oh well. Update: No, it's in C with plugins in Python (and other languages)) Browsing the accepted organizations is a little frustrating. I've made enterprisey software in Java. I made a 2D platformer in Python (+ PyGame). I'm almost done with a genetic algorithm that generates tic-tac-toe AIs in Common Lisp. I fully admit that there's thousands of people who know much much more about programming than I do, but I feel like I'm doing all right, especially since the GSoC is aimed at students.....but I don't know much about webdev or databases or C, and that's surprisingly limiting.

But even when I was working with Mnemosyne's application, I was thinking that in the likely event it didn't work out, OpenOffice could be a backup. It wasn't on the main list last time I checked, but now LibreOffice is and despite their main tag being "C++", I can't believe that a mostly-Java project wouldn't want a Java dev. And there's a few others that have potential too--things just require a surprising amount of digging. (And even if I submit an application, it won't be like it was with Mnemosyne since I didn't introduce myself on the mailing list last month. Sigh.)

I'm sorry if that sounded whiney; this has been a frustrating month.

>I apologize for the delay in responding. The plumbing at my home just decided it wanted to play a little game called "yay flood time."

It would be inexcusable for me to complain about a two hour turnaround time. No need to apologize. (Heck--it took me four hours to respond to you and I didn't even have bad plumbing! Just company over for dinner.) And that stinks about your plumbing--I hope it got patched up quickly and that nothing important was damaged in the flood.

>Best of luck to you.

Thanks, and also many thanks for your comments in general!