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Sure, but I think this is just normal as a company grows. When the company is tiny, you have a ton of hats. As the company grows, those hats become too big for you to wear all of them, and so you ("they") hire some people to take some of those hats from you. As a developer, if you don't have clear aspirations toward management, usually you go nowhere: your influence erodes until you end up "just another developer", regardless of your tenure in the company. If you do want to keep doing development, then you need to push management (early on) to create a technical track that's parallel to the management track. There should be technical positions (that come with no direct reports) that are at the same level (both prestige and pay) as manager, director, VP, etc. They need to be well defined, and it should be clear how it's expected that a developer will progress to those levels. So what I'm saying is that I don't think the OP's real problem is that he has fewer roles, but just that, as the company has grown, he's remained a "leaf node" in the org chart, which just gets deeper as time goes on. If you think about the management hierarchy as your own hierarchy, that's just naturally going to happen. If you have parallel tracks, it stings a bit less. Or, the OP is basically just built to work at small companies, and he should plan on joining a company when it's small, and then hopping to another small company when it gets too large. That's a perfectly valid strategy, too. |