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Since moving to the US I have had several IT jobs at differing levels but up until my current position I have found a certain consistency in "corporate attitude".
-- When I have the interview they have been excited about my ability to "fix" problems at previous positions and my passion for "doing it right".
-- When I start the job they are excited about my ability to "fix" the code, the development procedures or, a couple of times, the staff.
-- After a while I usually push to implement better procedures for IT, such as backups, source control and testing (all three sadly lacking in surprisingly many cases). I get lauded for this and full cooperation and upper management support until the rethink usually based on shoestring budgeting.
-- I usually get requests for new modules, features, systems, whatever; but with amazingly short deadlines. I put in extra long hours and miraculously produce these (with almost no errors). I get lauded and free pizza lunches or cast trophies, clocks, etc. for my desk for this.
-- I get requests to review and refactor all previous code - but not to spend too much time on it. I do some of this and get initially lauded for it.
-- I then get requests to document "everything" that ever existed - but not to spend any time on it! I do some of this and get nothing for it.
However, after a few of these successful projects they start to expect at least three miracles before breakfast each day. If I ever "slack off" back to "normal" 40+10 hours a week working with sensible timescales or object to endless impossible deadlines with the company, department, team is now in good shape (has been saved from certain doom) then I get poor reviews all of a sudden or pay raises & bonuses are suddenly reduced or cancelled due to "budgetary constraints" or because the company is "having a bad year" - even though my extra work and intervention has on two occasions saved the company from bankruptcy and pushed it back into profitability.
I was getting fed up of having to say "my work here is done" and finding another company in trouble to go and save.
At my last job working in Europe I worked for an international giant start-up company based near Munich, Germany where the concrete was still wet when I started. Top, highly experienced and talented People from all over the world came together and created an amazingly capable high performance system almost from nothing over the course of a few years bringing it to production status nearly two years ahead of schedule (we were all doing three miracles before breakfast regularly back then). Then the accountants took over running the company and didn't want all the high power (and high paid) people any more so they made life unpleasant with poor reviews, reduced benefits (carefully done by making everything more restricted rather than any quantifiable reduction, such as extra paperwork to request everything, delays, permissions required, etc., "Yes, of course you can still use the office telephones for personal calls, just enter this personalized, ten-digit code number before you dial the actual number", that sort of thing). This drove the good people to resign and get other jobs - the cheaper people stayed, money saved, system now mostly in static, maintenance mode".
Anyway, I digress. Back to the point:
Does anyone else have this experience of the gratitude and respect wearing off over time and eventually being treating like a drone no matter how talented you are or what good work you have done to date?
Note: My current position is an amazing exception as I have constant challenges but are given good tools and enough time and help to complete all my projects successfully. My opinions and ideas are listened to and occasionally, (actually quite often) acted upon. The pay isn't as quite good as the other companies (but is enough) and there aren't any automatic pay raises or bonuses - but I was told that at the interview. The team I work with are all exceptional. Team pizza lunches are fairly common. I expect to stay here a long time.
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
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You missed the point. Who actually said that gratitude has anything to do with doing good work ?
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Do not feed the troll ! - Common proverb
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I think it's just you. After all, Dilbert is a strip about how happy workers are, with great managers and technical decisions made by clued up people for the right reasons.
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Quote: I think it's just you.
Darn! I was hoping it wasn't just me... ho hum.Quote: Dilbert is a strip about how happy workers are...
Are we reading the same strip? 
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
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You've mismanaged their expectations. That's a common failure mode of parts people who are good at what they do and not lazy.
You have to give them a certain amount of disappointment, too. Not so much that they want to get rid of you, but just enough so that they won't take success for granted. Then every time you give them a little nugget of success, they're not so spoiled that they won't even notice.
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I agree, I think by mismanaging their expectations you are, to a certain degree, setting yourself up for this.
Quote: -- I usually get requests for new modules, features, systems, whatever; but with amazingly short deadlines. I put in extra long hours and miraculously produce these (with almost no errors).
[...]
However, after a few of these successful projects they start to expect at least three miracles before breakfast each day.
Especially in a new job the desire to please and show your worth is high, but you have to be willing to push back when the requests get unrealisitic (and they always do). Force management to prioritize their requests. It's one thing to perform heroics from time to time to save a project and another altogether to set the bar for your manager's expectations at a place where heroics are the norm.
A good way of doing this is taking time off. If I work four 12 hour days to get something delivered there's no way you're seeing me in the office on the 5th day.
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And on the 5th day, AnalogNerd surveyed his works and saw that it was good.
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Forogar wrote: ...my extra work and intervention has on two occasions saved the company from bankruptcy and pushed it back into profitability.
If they were that close to bankruptcy before you started, it would take a whole lot more than snazzy programming to actually make a company profitable again. It sounds as though they've been in trouble for a long time, and you simply made them less so. Of course if they are even $1 in the black, that's profitable in the eyes of some.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
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Actually in both cases they had a one main product (very good conceptually) that didn't work properly basically due to some really bad code.
In one company the coders (not good enough to be called programmers) had all quit as they couldn't figure out what was going wrong (multi-threading can really confuse some people) after weeks of trying. The main customers were ready to switch to a rival product if the many and varied problems were not resolved quickly (I came from one of the customer companies and was specifically recruited because I knew the product). I fairly quickly found the major problems and we issued a new release which four out of five the customers very happy. The fifth customer (each of these were very big contracts for a very complex product) did leave us and went to a rival product - they did eventually come back to us a couple of years later, the rival was worse (in different ways)!
In the other company the President and CEO thought of himself as a great developer but was actually an old mainframe, single-threaded, COBOL batch guy who was seriously out of date. He spent more time worrying about time-sheets (which everyone dutifully filled out by hand every week to show 5 8-hour days) and the shape and colour of the logo than anything else. We had one main customer providing 85% of the company income that was ready to quit. I took over the development team with a free hand to do whatever was necessary (the first thing I did was scrap the time-sheets altogether). They had recently changed from a stand-alone PC program that ran one data analysis job at a time (using 100% of the machine) to a client-server where multiple jobs could be submitted to be run against the DB and the client PCs only created the requests and displayed the results as they became available. The front end was in Delphi and they tried the back end in Delphi too - and failed miserably, performance and reliability were abysmal; drag and drop doesn't tend to make very good multi-threaded server services. I rewrote the back end from scratch in C++ and saved the day - and the company.
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
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Quoting Homer Simpson: : "You don't like your job, you don't strike. You go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way"
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Forogar wrote: I then get requests to document "everything" that ever existed - but not to spend any time on it! I do some of this and get nothing for it.
And you wonder why so many devs dont even bother 
If I want to write documentation, I would have become an author. I write code, not words.
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I agree, but it's always nice when someone else has written some good documentation. Of course, this hardly ever happens.
I write code and words and am currently working on my fourth book (although my second fiction book).
My first book (WWII POW escape fiction) was painstakingly typed on an old manual typewriter but was lost in a fire after six months of work!
My second book was a manual for an RPG game I and some of my friends developed. I volunteered to write up the rules (I didn't trust any of my friends to be legible, never mind the layout, the spelling, etc.) After a few pages I switched to using Word on the computer (Word 1.0 for DOS - which shows how long ago it was) and it ended up being thirty chapters and over four hundred pages! When I finished it I was using Word 97.
My third book was a technical manual for the first of the products I mentioned above - it had so many features (including a built-in Rexx macro language) the manual was over three hundred pages. It was actually two books, a technical reference and a user guide but they had a lot of commonality.
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
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After 20 years of using computers, I still cant touch type. 
I guess this is why I am so attracted to Twitter 
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I think you've just explained in far fewer words than it would have taken me why I enjoy being a contractor. I get to go into companies that have a problem. I get to throw the kitchen sick at the problem usually with management support. I get paid and thanked in appropriate measure for my project saving intervention. I eat pizza in cheestastically large quantities then I go home again and don't have to care what their accountants think or whether I did enough politically correct training courses to be given on or above the average pay rise at the next annual review. I have worked, as an employee, for companies ranging from 10 people to 30,000 people and with exceptions I can say the smaller the better. Now I work for an ideal sized company, #employees 1. 
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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Forogar wrote: Does anyone else have this experience of the gratitude and respect wearing off over time and eventually being treating like a drone no matter how talented you are or what good work you have done to date?
Yes. I've learned to not demonstrate my true performance capability, as it becomes not just expected 100% of the time, but a) isn't actually desired and b) fosters discord with other less-performant team members and c) I end up appearing as a maverick rather than a team player.
From what I've seen, I think other people have figured this out way before me, because the people I've worked with are smart and fully capable of being a lot more productive. But they've learned also that productivity doesn't pay--managers make idiotic decisions, don't support the tools people could really use, IT security policies get in the way of doing real work, endless meetings, no flexibility for people who want to telecommute, and so forth, that are all productivity killers and foster a "I really don't give a sh*t" attitude because obviously the plantation owners don't give a sh*t about us. So, a chair is warmed for 8 hours and mission statements like "we aim to be the leader of our industry" trickle down like brown leaves on an autumn wind which time and invisible bacteria eventually compost.
Marc
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Forogar wrote: Does anyone else have this experience of the gratitude and respect wearing
off over time...
Wisdom comes with age.
Naturally when young everything seems new and thus nothing is normal. Plus with lack of experience one always thinks that they are playing catch-up (which is sometimes true and sometimes not.)
That changes with age and it allows one to look around. If one is observant one will notice the chaos that represents humanity and with a bit more wisdom recognize that it isn't possible to fix that and at best it is only possible to mitigate it a bit. But only with the cooperation of many others (which usually means they must have recognized the problem as well.)
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Always try to look on it from the other people's point of view.
Guy starts at company.
I ask him to do something (I don't know if it's a miracle or an easy-peasy job - I just ask for it)
Guy does it by next day.
I am pleased (but not overjoyed - it obviously only took him 10 minutes to do).
Repeat that a few times.
This guy regularly does the work that is asked of him , on time. Tick, good review. Everyone happy.
Time passes.
Ask guy to perform small (in my mind) job - but it takes over a week! He seems to be slacking off.
As others have said, you need to manage expectations.
When you get the job to do you need to tell them that in order to do it, you will need to work extra hours unless other jobs are affected. If they insist it needs to be done then fine, work the hours, do the job - then LEAVE AT 2pm telling the boss it's to make up for the extra time worked.
First time you do it may lead to an argument - look innocent and say "So you're saying you expect me to put in as many hours extra as I'm asked, for no time off in lieu or compensation? Oh! I didn't realise!"
At that point, work EXACTLY the contracted hours. NEVER start early (even if you're in the building, just read the paper) and leave at 5pm even if you are in a meeting or on the phone to a customer.
You will find that either
a) negotiations re time off in lieu or overtime payments start.
b) you get fired.
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Quote: At that point, work EXACTLY the contracted hours. NEVER start early (even if you're in the building, just read the paper) and leave at 5pm
I tried that - I got "b)"ed.
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...
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