Preface: I've been at my current place of employment for 18 months as a developer. I have in that time made some mistakes as I'm sure someone with the same tenure would, but I've had a lot more successes. I work really hard and care deeply about what I do, and I hope every last one of my colleagues are keenly aware of that.

I have an icy relationship with one of the two company founders. He and I have a very neutral relationship, he actively ignores when I try to be personable with him and I find he barely talks to me like I'm a human being. This in itself isn't a big deal at all, but I've had a number of small flashpoints with him where I've come away preferring a different outcome. On a current project, a decision was made earlier in the week that was clearly set in place that runs concurrent to the project (the use of a third-party service that enables the collection of certain information that every developer on the build needs). I offered to collect all of that information and put it into our chosen tool, but reluctantly because of the fact I really couldn't come off development work to perform that task, something I made clear to the Project Manager (the timeframe has been constrained somewhat significantly due to no fault of our own, and a couple of delays at the project have somewhat complicated things further this week). The PM arranged for this tool to be set up, and once it became aware that there was too much questioning or discussion around why it was being made available, I repeatedly suggested that I might as well just do the task out-of-hours. This was denied, as it was already made quite clear that I have been working a rather silly amount of my own time on this project to try and bring it back.

Today, discussion on it ramped up in the project Slack channel, and the PM was nowhere to be seen (I'm not suggesting that was suspicious in any way, she is very skilled at what she does and is also a very pleasant person to work with). Questions such as "why is this a thing?" and "why can't Anonymous just get all of the data out?" when if I had spoken up with the full facts, it would've came across that I was throwing the PM under the bus. I'd have preferred to avoid doing this because I'm not that sort of person, so I sent the aforementioned Director a DM instead.

Me: "I'd rather communicate separately with you about this if that's OK"

D: "no thanks"

Perfectly verbatim. Nothing else was said. This was six hours ago, the working day has ended. When something like this occurs, all I can really do is apply my own mindset to what happened and put myself in the shoes of the other person. All I keep coming back with is, it would've taken the tiniest amount of time to come back with "hey, let's just park this for now" or "please can you keep any comments in the public Slack channel?" I have read that response about a dozen times and I don't see a relationship there where both parties have respect for each other. That feels like it's a problem to me.

I would've spoken up by now, but the nature of our relationship is as such that I don't really think he values me at all, and any comment I'd have to make feels a lot like I would have to trade my principles and integrity for my stable wage. I don't trust at all that he would have an open and constructive discourse with me if I were to raise it with him, we quite simply don't have that sort of relationship (regardless of how much I've tried, and how much commitment I show to my work).

Thanks all, sorry for the long read.