This is why one should never look for a job and just let the job find you; and where linkedin works so damn well. In my own case I just let jobs find me and I tripled my salary in 5 years.
Ya our first job should be to find jobs and make ourselves the most employable we can be. Our second job is our current job.
If you have to work on many bugs or some not so critical tasks instead of working on some hard tech stuff. It’s bad. Or you see it as an investment and hope that the managers will like it and (truly :)) reward it down the road. Or else it’s a waste of your time and ressources because after X amont of time you will become a lot less valuable that what you could have been. And that will hurt you for your next job and the next and the next..
No you have to do the total opposite. Blitz search and pursue 20 job offers at the same time all packed in a month. Then start to pick and chose the few best ones and make them compete against each other on salary, stock options, career opportunities, perks…
That’s how you get the leverage back at the table.
And if you like your current company you talk to your employer about the oh so much better job offers you got. With real job offers, or they come with a better offer or in the worst case you will end up in a better company with a better salary, perks, tech stack, etc…
of course, the issue then becomes why settle for only ~1% of the value you produce as a salary?