[Joeri]

What is your title? I'm guessing it's developer or engineer. If you view yourself as such, others also view you as such, and you won't be considered for management roles, because you're not a manager. I've chosen this for myself deliberately, and i accept that the cost is that i have to define my role more narrowly. I don't think how long you are at a company matters that much, or even should matter much. As the old saying goes: what have you done for me lately?

I've seen this transition happen myself, where the company grew, got cut up into a bunch of departments, all of which got a manager, mostly external hires. I feel like this way of organizing companies (departments, hierarchical, middle management, etc) is an anti-pattern. Everybody does it because everybody does it, but every dividing line you add reduces efficiency, and I've seen firsthand how damaging middle management is to the agility at the individual level. I don't know what the antidote to this anti-pattern is, but i feel like company structure is a territory ripe for innovation.