Howdy

I joined a startup ~2 years ago as employee #2 (software engineer), and thus I've had the responsibility of essentially building every technical aspect of the company from the ground up, which I loved. Now, the company scaled up (about 45 people) but, instead of being happy, I feel like everything's been taken away from me:

- Technical strategy: I strongly shaped the technical direction of the company defining a lot of critical points, and now they brought in a VP of engineering

- Management: I managed an entire team of 10 people without ever missing a deadline of the whole team, and now they brought in an engineering manager

- Customer facing roles: I was having a lot of customer interaction and support, now they brought in a support engineer and I don't even know who our users are anymore

- Infrastructure management: I took care of building a state-of-the-art scalable and fully automated infrastructure in the public cloud, and now they brought in an operation guy

- Developer: This is the only thing I still do, full time

Essentially, and I understand it's just my ego speaking, I feel like there has not been any career advancement for me. The only benefit has been the gazillion things I learned in this ~2 years journey by doing the above roles.

I've been told that now, since I don't have to worry about the other things, I can focus on what I'm able to do best, just writing code (which I agree, all the tasks I did were less challenging than some critical parts of the code base I wrote from scratch), but still in the "about us" web page of startups just the management is going to be listed and take the credits. Where did I fail to claim my part when the company was growing?

I understand this is a first world rant and and I should just "be happy" it has been a success so far, but still I find it hard and I would very much appreciate the opinion of other people who went through something similar.

Thank you

user:	psp
created:	October 1, 2014
karma:	-3