We had a very successful exit not long ago and now I feel like I'm being phased out by other later hired employees.
One particular employee in marketing has decided to basically hand over my job to other people and although I'm still fully responsible and the only one doing what I do - i.e I'm told "you will do this" without being asked on my input on how/if it should be done. There are meetings without me where this is decided.
Since I'm close to the founder and he seems oblivious, I tried to calmly tell him using facts what the situation is and how I feel about it. The only thing I'm getting as replies are "yes right", "I'll check what happened" and so on.
On the bright side - I've been promised my own team and given the ability to hire it and I'm happy about that. I've been told that I can work on more interesting things - like the ones I've started working with, not fixing boring bugs or doing copy-paste code.
The issue I'm having is that the other employees are doing decisions which I'm being kept out of the loop and which are directly related to my role and that makes the work environment toxic.
And I've also been burned out for a long time and having serious health issues due to that.
Since the exit was very successful, I can afford to quit and not work for at least 10 years. What's stopping me is that I'm doing work that I love and that is a passion of mine.
What do you suggest - quit, take a long break, talk to founder again?
edit: I'm in my 20s
I was once early employee at a startup, I helped build half of it and founder, a certain P. A. had said to me that my role has been extremely important in the growth.
We had numerous successes, such as selling software for 8 bit microcomputers and a major operating system deal for the IBM PC that secured our place in history.
Then I started to feel like I was phased out by later hired employees; I was no longer getting to tinker around with BASIC interpreters.
Other people got to have all the fun making a windowing system that was bolted on to DOS.
Sigh.
That's just how it goes.
Yours Truly, Bill.
edit: I'm in my 60s.