I'm a scientist/engineer at a startup, one year out of a PhD program (finished while working), have been working about 1 year, 3 months. Prior to last month, I had been working on many different aspects of product development including UX, writing code for microcontrollers, prototyping algorithms, designing new product features. Now the company has raised a lot of capital and brought on half a dozen heavyweight 20+ year experienced engineers and coders. As a result, I don't do any of the things I used to do and now work on difficult, at times seemingly intractable research projects to develop advanced product features we haven't quite figured out and would, no matter the outcome, give us valuable knowledge.
To be quite honest, I'm not too happy about this. I've expressed how I'd like to have some role in product development outside of pure research, and the line I've been given is "you are best equipped for this task and the company needs you to do this." They are probably right, but I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around the changes.
How do you suck it up in this situation and make the very best of organizational changes and role changes, particularly in a startup environment? I do think leaving, while an option, would be a really bad idea given the potential for the product and the company and the great stuff I've been able to learn. I'm just a bit frustrated and feeling a little pinned down in my role shift at the moment.