Ask HN: Well paid but trapped by job title?
When I first joined I came in as "Front-end Developer", and over the past years I've lead many successful large projects, and have been a dedicated employee. All this had lead to me getting a good amount of pay raises, I'm now leading a team of 15 developers, and I'm relied upon to lead many of the important projects for the company.
The issue is, my job title hasn't really changed over the years (basically it's now "Lead Front-end Developer"). In fact, as we've grown, despite asking to be considered for promotions, the company has only hired from outside for higher level positions in engineering, and mostly given me raises instead (to be clear, it's not just me that they haven't promoted, other iOS and backend developers also leading teams have not been promoted as well). When I've asked if I could be promoted, I've gotten a vague "maybe in a few years" response from them, and to be fair to them, I was never promised a promotion from my position, I just assumed if I worked really hard and showed my value, eventually I'd rise up the ranks of the company.
From what they've told me, it will be probably be at least two more years before I'll grow any higher at my company, and because we're growing so fast as well, the people we are hiring for the next positions are also way more qualified than me (former VPs of Facebook), which I'll never be able to compete with if I'm being honest with myself.
All this makes me consider leaving for another company, but because I haven't been promoted very often, but I have been given raises, any position at my same "level" will be a huge step down (for reference, the average Front-end Developer salary where I live is 50k/year, and I'm at 150k/year + benefits).
All this feels like a huge 1st world problem, but it's really been painful for me. Anyone in a similar situation that can share?