[deangiberson]

I'd focus on a repeating theme in your post, "and now they". This suggests that you already see a division between the management of the company and yourself. You haven't been part of the decision making process and feel that all possible angles have been locked out by an outside agency. How much feedback have you given to the company management that you would be interested in those positions before they where "taken" from you? Have you done a gap analysis between your current operating skill set and the expectations for those position? What skills have you tried to improve outside of "developer" recently that would show you are trying to expand your role?

You need to get past the "been told", and start communicating what you want to achieve. It might be too late at this company, but I would bet not, just because these roles are already filled doesn't mean they will stay filled, or that tasks won't outgrow the current holder. Think ahead, and aim for a goal, communicate with every means you have that your ready for that goal.

"Fortune favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur

[kelnos]

Sure, but I think this is just normal as a company grows.

When the company is tiny, you have a ton of hats. As the company grows, those hats become too big for you to wear all of them, and so you ("they") hire some people to take some of those hats from you.

As a developer, if you don't have clear aspirations toward management, usually you go nowhere: your influence erodes until you end up "just another developer", regardless of your tenure in the company.

If you do want to keep doing development, then you need to push management (early on) to create a technical track that's parallel to the management track. There should be technical positions (that come with no direct reports) that are at the same level (both prestige and pay) as manager, director, VP, etc. They need to be well defined, and it should be clear how it's expected that a developer will progress to those levels.

So what I'm saying is that I don't think the OP's real problem is that he has fewer roles, but just that, as the company has grown, he's remained a "leaf node" in the org chart, which just gets deeper as time goes on. If you think about the management hierarchy as your own hierarchy, that's just naturally going to happen. If you have parallel tracks, it stings a bit less.

Or, the OP is basically just built to work at small companies, and he should plan on joining a company when it's small, and then hopping to another small company when it gets too large. That's a perfectly valid strategy, too.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

That sounds good too, but aren't you presupposing that this course of things is normal. The OP is saying things turned out differently than expected, and such dissonance really bugs him. Why would he work harder to communicate when working hard has failed so poorly in the past?

Second and third world people probably have similar problems too.

[mlakewood]

In my experience, what other people thought you communicated and what you thought communicated are often very far apart. Its an amazing thing, Humans are so good at communication but also so bad. I know with my significant other multiple times we have both got upset with each other for actions/inaction that we thought we had communicated with the other, when either we hadnt or hadnt clearly. We have been together for 10 years, and it still happens.

Communication is possibly the hardest thing to get right between two people, because it seems so effortless.