At my last job, I couldn't advance because all my strategic work was pushed off to do IT related work (I'm in fucking marketing). It was a $3.1BN company, with a large dedicated IT staff, and I got caught up being the goto guy for small issues in my department.
So - naturally, when you can't advance because all your time is spent doing this bullshit, you watch all your peers who focus 100% on strategic stuff move up. I had one boss who took me off all the bullshit and I was on my way up. It was great - being challenged and accomplishing all sorts of things. She left to take more money.
Next boss found out I was skilled in all that IT garbage, put me back on all that shit AND made me do the strategic stuff. Thanks?
Everything got done, but apparently, they wanted me to quit the company, or at least the department to save money without doling out severance. After being chewed out repeatedly over nothing (projects were delayed but the ball was 100% in the court of my associates in South Africa. I'm in the USA), they finally decided to eliminate my position and consolidate the role with a more senior position (cool, so what I was doing was 3 levels higher than what you were paying me for - AND I was doing other shit).
It was fairly clear the strategy was "get him to quit" - but little did they know that at the time, I valued myself too little to quit a shitty job.
I took a generous severance and got a better, more strategic job. When it comes to ANYTHING outside of my realm of strategic marketing expertise, I stay fucking quiet. No one here knows that I'm experienced in IT outside of planning digital marketing projects.
It was a hard, frustrating lesson to learn. Don't let ANYONE get more value out of you than what they're paying you. When someone goes "THIS IS YOUR JOB" and you have this gut feeling that it isn't, verify it, and then communicate that no, it's not your job, and you're not getting paid to do this garbage.
It has been 8 months since leaving. I found out that NONE of the projects that I was repeatedly chewed out about have budged, no one uses any of the IT-related platforms anymore because there's no one to walk them through/fix shit, and life crawls at the speed of shit because they mismanaged a valuable resource. They're in for one of their worst years in the last few decades, and I'm here pumped that I'm getting paid to do what I'm supposed to be doing.