Taken for a ride by management?
I have been at my company for a few years now. I don't officially report to a manager/director, I report directly to the CTO (I was an early startup employee). This is the story of what they make me do inside the company: 1) Somewhere in the company there is a project in my area of expertise that is terribly falling behind, typically due to an inexperienced tech lead/manager who made very bad design decisions. Sometimes this manager is fired (especially if it caused disgrace in front of a customer), sometimes not. 2) I am tasked with basically taking over the project and becoming the de-facto leader. I typically revisit the architecture, sometimes proposing major changes, and once we agree on the new architecture I make sure the developers keep focusing on the most impactful thing. I typically do 40% hands on (design + coding), 30% team management and 30% bragging to upper stakeholders about the project progress. I always give all the credit to the entire team. This phase goes on for a few months. 3) When the project is finally on track and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel (i.e. we are 80% dev complete and we have a production plan etc.), they quickly take me away from it and install another manager or director as new leader of the project. The first couple times this happened I thought to myself "damn, I must have screwed up and they are removing me mid project", but nobody provided me any negative feedback. But this literally happened 3 more times since then. I feel that I would like to capitalize these skills to mature in a more technical and structured leadership role (manager? director?), but every time I have been told that I am "too valuable" at what I do. The reality is that recovering projects in this state is very hard work and it's quite depressing seeing that the keys will be handed at the last mile, and some random bozo will take the ownership/credit even if they haven't done anything. TC: 350k yoe: 9
OP, sounds like you have rad skills. Unless they are compensating you well for saving a sinking ship and giving you another sinking ship to save; you gotta move. If you feel cheated on doing all the heavy lifting while someone else takes the credit; bring it up. The way I see this situation is that; having you can save any failing project. So that way you are definitely indispensable. You sound like a valuable asset to any organization.
Negotiate the title.
What would a title be? "senior Fixer"?
Something sexy
It doesn't sound like the execs care about you even though you're an early employee and doing so much for them. How much do you care about this startup? It may be time to let them burn. This experience should be very helpful in system design rounds at most big companies.
Guessing below You are excellent technical leader but horrible people manager. You can set technical direction, design architecture, code and point people to do right thing. You can’t (or not trysted to) motivate people long term, grow their careers, do PIPs and communicate XFN so not good candidate for manager. You can also be asshole but very valuable asshole. Too valuable to fire but not management material. Ask people that you worked with if you were their manager what you should have done differently. Would they report to you?
Worth considering OP
Quite frankly, I might be a bit of an asshole I’ll admit. I wasn’t always like that but I developed resentment towards the company for doing this to me (and towards myself for doing it). Team members like me though: many many times people told me while having coffee that they were really glad I joined the project and that I mentored them or went to battle with stakeholders to get more reasonable deadlines considering the project scope, so go figure...
Nobody gives a damn. I interviewed at FAANG last year and it was just leetcode (luckily I passed the interviews), and they wouldn't consider me for a leadership role since my career on paper is all SWE experience.
Why didn't you mention that you lead this team on your resume?