About 2 years ago I was hired at a large media company as a graphic designer. For the first four months my job was designing online ads and doing basic HTML/CSS templating tasks. Easy peasy, no problem there.

After the first few months my love of programming and system administration was noticed and I began mixing a bit of PHP and Ruby development into my workflow. Again, no problem there.

Within a few months my entire job description had changed. I no longer do any graphic design. Literally none. I'm fine with that, it's not my passion anyway. But this point I'm managing two Linux application servers (nginx, mySQL, PHP, Ruby, etc), writing code 8 hours a day. Most recently I've been joined development of a new product using Ruby on Rails.

I admit I kind of let this happen, but I'm getting increasingly frustrated. At this point, despite doing the work of a full-time devmin, on paper I'm still a designer with a very low designer's wage (approx 26k/yr).

I've talked to management about this twice now, once when I first started doing more programming work (around 4 months after starting), and once about a month ago (after nearly 2 years at the company). Both times I requested the title of "programmer" or "sysadmin" but both times I was refused and given the excuse "you're growing into the position."

See http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=BiEMLwfw for the rest.