I’m pretty miffed. Was hired onto a small creative agency for an entry-level position around this time last year. They offered me 50k, and I was over the moon. Seemed more than fair at the time for my minimal career experience. And it then became my mission to prove myself worthy of even more over the year.
I have gone far above and beyond all expectations, and have received a ton of glowing verbal feedback from the whole team along the way to confirm it. Took on as much work as I possibly could, went overtime without additional pay some nights to deliver stellar results, actively used spare blocks of time to learn more skills, singlehandedly brought on new services the company wasn’t able to offer before, helped staff weekend client events outside of my job scope…the whole nine yards.
I work in a 2-person division (just supervisor & myself) within the 10-person company. Problem is, my supervisor very quickly caught onto how capable I am and we are now at the point where I handle almost every single project that comes into our division with little to no help (or even supervision). Sometimes she’ll offer helpful critiques or even directly help finish something off, but it’s become more & more rare. Most common case as of late is she’ll take a few hours to respond “looks good; you can send it back.” What’s worse is that she tends to take credit for a lot of it and I have to bite my tongue while I watch it happen. And she’ll often ask me to explain what’s going on, making it pretty obvious she isn’t paying much attention. AND she asks me to screenshot my time sheet every week so she can copy it (“I forgot to log my hours again! What a crazy week! Can you send yours?”)
Anyway supervisor came to me last week and said “you’ve been doing so amazingly that we decided to offer you an extra 3,000 per year!! And a bonus!” To me, this feels a bit exploitative as I am no longer performing as an entry-level employee. My responsibilities and quality of output are much more in line with that of a mid-level position at least, and my supervisor even said almost exactly that in our annual review. But she’s implied I will remain at “junior” status for the next few years, and has urged me “not to get discouraged if you’re not excelling at the same rate of others at the company! We’re just a small team of 2 so it’s harder for you.”
This makes no sense at all to me. Now I’m no longer incentivized to work as hard if I know that all I have to do is just wait around another arbitrary amount of years for a job title promotion & raise.
I‘ve done research, talked to peers in my industry, and poked around job listings, and it seems I could easily get 65-70k elsewhere. I just like the type of work I do here, I like my team for the most part, and to be fair I get above-average benefits (great healthcare plan, fully remote, and unlimited PTO).
What can I do here? I tried scheduling a call with the CEO to discuss my case but have been told I need to have this talk with my supervisor who will then play a game of corporate telephone to the CEO. And supervisor is obviously not inclined to share with her boss that I’ve been doing the overwhelming bulk of “our” workload. I feel stuck and sulky.
Any advice? Feel free to check me if what I’m expecting here is unreasonable.
(Edited for further anonymity by removing my job title / industry field)