Rather predictability, work have pretty much said they're not giving me a payrise any time soon. I was told a month or so ago (and I was shown a whatsapp message between my manager and the CEO confirming this) that if a certain customer paid their bill then they would look at the raise my manager has requested for me (and I haven't actually found out yet how much this is actually for - which feels stupid as I type this out, but all the conversations were rushed in hallways, or similar). They paid their bill just before Christmas (and I was given a bonus (£100) for my work on the report that lead to this payment - before we knew the payment was made), and now this week my manager is saying the department is not making enough money for people to get raises and he wants us to work overtime at least twice a week for the indefinite future (potentially up to 6 months +) so we can complete some ideas he has for new products and marketing. This is 3 times in the last 12 months my manager has said I'm getting a raise for it to be knocked back.
He hasn't fully quantified what work he wants to be done, when he wants it to be done by, and why he doesn't think it can be done by then during regular hours - it's more a knee-jerk reaction that he's going some rough ideas of things he wants to do, and doesn't feel they're happening fast enough. But he just keeps piling more and more things for people to do, never weighs up the workload, and expects everything to be done 'now' - and if it's not possible to get things done as quickly as he wants then that's our issue, and we just need to work more.
I keep being given more and more responsibility, and the range of the type of work I do just keeps growing. I started off essentially being a project admin, and now run projects, oversee people, oversee the set up of products and services, assist in marketing and website updates, assisting with sales and proposals (and overseeing proposals built by others), assist with and help run R&D projects, and am trying to completely re-designing a CRM/project management/asset management/ticketing system tool from the ground up because we are essentially a business within a business and can't find anything that covers everything we need in a single product - and especially one that the CEO would be willing to pay for.
There is minimal high level strategy, and we just have to keep adapting to each new idea he gets, and I continuously get crap for trying to be "too organised / going into too much detail" - despite me proving with my most detailed, yet more praised, work (the report previously mentioned) that you need a lot of raw organised data to create detailed dashboards and reports for customers (the only bit my manager cares about, but he just wants to the front end to 'appear' - when he see me working on the back end he complains it's overkill).
He also just blindly dismisses work I've done, without looking at it. We're at the beginning of a large project and we need to inform the customer how long it's going to take. This is not a simple question, as it depends how many customers they get, and how many locations they want to roll out to. But it also doesn't scale uniformly, as an initial set up of a customer takes longer than adding to an established customer. So I worked out how long each section takes, then created a calculator so you can hypothesise scenarios (such as, Stage 1: initial set up, Stage 2, 1 customer, 10 locations, stage 3: 3 additional customers, 7 locations each, Stage 4, customer 1 adds 25 locations - etc) and it calculates man-hours for you, based on our early tests. As I tried to explain it to his, saying I want to show him my working (as he's the primary on the project) - so we can set the customers expectations - his response was "I don't believe you", and hasn't look at it. (He has informed the customer how long I think it would be - but again with the qualifier that he doesn't believe me)
But despite all this extra work I'm doing the department's numbers are currently flat on last year. But my job isn't directly sales - so I feel a huge sense of resentment that I'm being asked more and more, but my compensation is essentially tied to other people's performance (excluding that bonus I got last month). But we have grown in other ways, and I was the one to figure this out. It could be argued our department has grown 50% in a year if you don't include a problem account that we're likely going to court over.
Apparently I'm due a 1-to-1 with my manager (the first time in 3 years they thought of doing something like this - they're very unorganised as a company), so I intend to ask specifically what milestones the department and I need to hit for me to get to a payrise, and how much this payrise would be. Issue being, and the reason I haven't pushed it before, is I'm almost certain there wont be answers for these and it's always down to how the CEO "feels" at that time.
I'm trying to look for other jobs, but there aren't many around here (especially this time of year, it seems). I had two interviews in Autumn and didn't get them - one because I went into too much technical detail in the interview (it was a simpler job that I do now, so I shouldn't have got carried away), and the other hasn't given me feedback despite multiple attempts to get some. I'm currently in the Manchester area, and I have some family in the South East that keep trying to convince me to move down there but the idea of moving when I haven't got a job is terrifying, especially if I can't land a job now I feel it's going to be just as difficult down south (and I beginning to feel I'm gooseberry fool at interviews, partly due to the irregular style of my job doesn't lead well to answering interview questions easily and concisely).
So yeah, like I said, bit of a rant.