TL;DR Company promoted me without a raise, citing my low years of experience. Do I keep doing my promotion until I have enough experience to get paid significantly more for the role somewhere else? Or do I put a lot of effort into finding a new, higher paying job at my last level?
First off, before I explain anything, my driving goal in my career is to get paid more for the same amount of hours that I'm selling my labor. Preferably, I'd do this in something I'm good at, somewhat contributes to the betterment of society, and is at least tolerable if not my passion. Eventually, I hope to cut down my hours to some kind of part-time consultancy and spend most of my days living out my relaxed countryside homestead dream.
Please bare with me as I have to be a little bit vague just in case my story goes viral and is recognizable by someone at my company…
I work at a small startup, where, like all startups, I wear many hats. I'm damn good at my job, too, despite being a younger professional in my field. Well, after months of being unofficially called the title of a promotion, and then being promised said promotion, I finally got it officially handed to me… but with caveats. After weeks of back-and-forth negotiation attempts with my boss and HR, I've accepted the fact they're only going to treat it as “lateral” and will not be paying me a dime more. Literally no adjustment to my salary at all, but my responsibilities in respect to the whole company HAS significantly increased.
They also backfilled my last role with two people a level higher than I was (and technically still am), much to my surprise… But also, I'm not really that shocked, knowing how much I was handling above my job scope… cue the reason for the promotion… And I'm prettIy sure I'll be fully training those two people on top of doing my new position, despite their claims that their job will be “different” and I'm only responsible for training them on “a small fraction of my responsibilities” now.
Needless to say, this company has caused me a lot of stress in the past few months during a time in my life where I'm already dealing with a lot of personal issues causing me great emotional turmoil (which they're aware of). Now I'm stuck at a crossroads trying to decide if it would be worth it for me to put energy into trying to jump ship in my niche field i.e., it will likely take months of looking for jobs, applying for jobs, interviewing, researching the company, etc.
On one hand, I'm quickly learning a lot of valuable, marketable skills in this new role. However, since I really skipped a couple rungs on my career ladder in taking this promotion (rather they'll admit it or not), it's highly unlikely I'll be hired for anything near this position at another company without even a year of doing the exact job. Alternatively, I could step back down, or even to the level of those two people I'll be training, and probably get a small raise. I've put some feelers out just throwing my resume at various companies and got a few bites, but nothing has panned out. I'm rather certain it would take me quite a while to find something in my niche field. Honestly, I'd really rather just chill out and not worry about it because of my previously mentioned personal life stress, but I can't seem to get the thought out of the back of my mind that they're taking advantage of me for cheap labor. The disillusionment with what WAS a decent company has just been all too real and it's been hard for me.
So what would you guys say I should do? Stay and treat it as an underpaid internship? Or try my hardest to leave, likely get a 10-30% raise, and wait who knows how long – probably at least a few years – for the opportunity to be in this should-be-higher-paying job to come back around…