I have been in a company for 3 years. I was the first developer, which gave me the title of CTO. I have been interested in the company’s capitals. We made our business grow, we raised some funds and now we are a small business of 10 peoples and among them 3 developer that I am managing.
With the coronavirus outbreaks, economic activity in our sector have heavily slow down. Our company might not die but for, at least, the next 8 month we will hardly have no growth.
On a personal scale, I am not happy with my job. I have made some mistakes in the way I developed my company codebase / infrastructure that made them hard and annoying to maintain. To not discourage others developer so they don’t leave, I do the hard and annoying maintenance while they work on the interesting projects that we decided to start appart from our main stack so there is no flaw in it.
Our roadmap is disturbed regularly by clients as they demand gets priority, making it hard for me to achieve anythings.
On top of that I’m earning 60% what a developer my worth should be paid on the market, because I’m a cofounder and the company is hardly making any money. (It should have been reevaluated as we were supposed to raise fund in may but that sounds compromised until Q4 if we are lucky).
So I have been thinking of leaving the company, as I have dreams to fulfil (working abroad / expat stuff) and I’m not willing to endure those conditions for another 8 month. I also think I have a lot more to learn and would love to find a business with new projects were I can learn news things from more experienced peers.
The problem is if I leave the company will die for sure as I handle ~ 60% of our technical infrastructure (+ it will kills hope of fund raising). But I don’t want the business to die, because my cofounder are 200% into it and loving it, all my coworker seems to like what they do and like the good company atmosphere we have (kinda everyone is friends with everyone).
To be short I hate my job and want to leave but I don’t want to be the bad and selfish guys and kill the company. What do I do?
Sorry for potential poor English.