It's nice to see someone have such a nice experience with their employment history. I actually have the opposite experience.

tldr: I am happy you had such good luck; mine sucked.

Worked in Tech Support (for a tech-related company), made tools to make mine and colleagues' from the department job easier and faster. This caught some attention from the infrastructure department, which got me "promoted" to junior sys admin. Nearly everyone kept point out how useful I am[1]. Yay!

But it's not really that much of a yay. It's now expected of me to still do tech support, work on those tools, do sys-ops for some big/corporate/enterprise clients, be the "errand boy" for the other [senior] sys admins (ie, do stuff that's "below" them or that they don't know how to do)

It gets worse. I am the lowest paid employee in the company, too. I get paid less than our DNS admins, simply because they're there longer (there's this certain "culture" in the company which I'll get to in a bit) and they hardly do anything, because most of their job is automated (and more so since I made their job even easier). I wouldn't even mind doing all this, but then pay me for all the three jobs I do. The reason for my salary is "historic": Is started working as a student, and even though I did get a few raises since my initial salary, it's still the lowest one in the company because the "base" salary is still what my student one was. I get paid ~£450 while the next person with the lowest salary gets ~£600 which is an [also under-appreciated] girl from the DNS department. Everyone from the tech support had at least ~£700, while my two sys admin colleagues get ~£1100 + bonuses; oh and I don't get bonuses for the same shit that they do; they even make me do something and then get the bonus for what I did. Sometime in the past they agreed to track "overtime" (which also includes any really special stuff for the really big clients which are outside of the contract that we'd do) under one user on Harvest, and just split it between themselves. I was given access to the harvest account and I tracked my time on it because I was told to do that. But they'd still split the money in half? The fuck. When I asked about it because I was genuinely not sure if I was doing something wrong, the response I got is, and I quote--because the absurdity of that moment is etched into my mind--was, "but I have three kids and you don't." I was too shocked to say anything and just murmured something in agreement. The other admin hasn't got any kids. He doesn't even have pets.

Also, some of the longer-employed employees are trying to push this "we're a family" bullshit, when anyone who's not them is clearly not part of the family, which is clear from how they all interact. If anyone from one of the "newbs" tries to buddy up, all they get is attitude.

And can't look for another job, because I wouldn't be able to relocate due to certain life circumstances that tie me to this town (at least for now).

Typing this is just making me furious so I'll stop now. I'll just like to add that, I am not in need of money, because I come from what is considered a "middle class" (I hate the labels, but they get the point across here) background. However the unfairness is what really gets to me.

[1]: Maybe I'm retarded and they want to make me feel nice.