This was almost exactly my experience at an old startup job.
It was inconvenient to do anything about my compensation (which was lower than appropriate for my experience level), and the boss deflected the issue every time I raised it.
The "value violation" there hurt, because I liked the company and the tech well enough, I just wanted to get paid closer to market rate, but that never happened. Eventually, I realized (after raising the issue 3+ times) I was never going to get a meaningful raise, and tendered my resignation shortly thereafter.
> ... the problem solver is doing two things: discovering a problem and solving it. Conflating these two things is a great way to encourage pushback
This squares with my experience strongly. At a prior job, I remember two or three times where a set of changes was almost rejected for production because despite solving real bugs. The bugs hadn't affected anything in production yet, but the fixes carried the risk of maybe breaking something.
This resulted in some fun times, like a particular client running something like three major versions behind on our software, precisely because management didn't want to accept any disruption risks there, and the old version grumbled along well enough.
It was inconvenient to do anything about my compensation (which was lower than appropriate for my experience level), and the boss deflected the issue every time I raised it.
The "value violation" there hurt, because I liked the company and the tech well enough, I just wanted to get paid closer to market rate, but that never happened. Eventually, I realized (after raising the issue 3+ times) I was never going to get a meaningful raise, and tendered my resignation shortly thereafter.