The Title Doesn't Match the Job: A Pattern I Keep Seeing in Nepali IT Startups

I want to be upfront about something before I say the rest of this: not every company does this, and I've worked with a few that genuinely don't. But having moved through several roles across Nepal's IT and startup scene, I've seen a pattern often enough that I don't think it's a coincidence anymore, and I think it's worth naming plainly.

The designation is generous. The job is not.

It's fairly common to see someone hired with a title like Manager, Senior Officer, Assistant Manager, or similar, that sounds like a real step up. On paper, it looks like recognition. In practice, the actual scope of the role, the decision-making authority, the pay, and the support that should come with that title often don't show up at all. The title costs the company nothing to hand out. Everything the title is supposed to represent costs something, and that's the part that quietly doesn't arrive.

I don't think this is always a calculated manipulation. Sometimes it's just optimism that outpaces the company's actual structure — everyone gets a senior-sounding title because everyone is expected to eventually grow into it. But the effect on the person holding that title is the same either way: a designation that looks good on a business card, and a job that doesn't match it.

"We're growing" as an answer to almost everything

There's a phrase I've heard some version of many times: we're a growing company, you're growing with us, there will be ups and downs, you'll learn a lot. All of that can be true and reasonable in a genuinely early-stage company. The problem is when it becomes the standard answer to almost any legitimate concern, instead of an honest acknowledgment paired with an actual plan.

Underpaid and overworked stops being a temporary phase of a startup's early days, and starts being the permanent operating model, justified indefinitely by the same growth story. "Someday everyone will benefit when we make it big" is a real possibility in some cases. It's also, often, a way to defer a conversation about fair compensation without ever actually having it.

The things that are legally yours, treated like favors

This is the part that bothers me most. Leaves, holidays, overtime pay, insurance — these aren't perks a generous employer chooses to extend when they feel like it. In most cases, they're legal entitlements. But I've seen environments where using any of them comes with a quiet undercurrent of fear that has nothing to do with what the law actually says.

Taking a sick day can come with the unspoken sense that you'll return to a slightly cooler reception, or a comment about "the team really needed you this week." Asking for your approved leave can feel like you're inconveniencing someone, even when it was planned and cleared months in advance. Working late becomes an unpaid expectation rather than compensated overtime, and pointing that out risks being read as not being a "team player," rather than simply asking for what the work already earned. Salary arriving late becomes something you're quietly expected to just absorb, without much explanation and without anyone treating it as the serious issue it actually is.

None of these are small, isolated things. Together, they add up to a specific kind of fear that has nothing to do with job performance: the fear of using what is already, legally, yours. People start managing their own expectations downward — not because the law changed, and not because they stopped needing rest, fair pay, or protection when they're sick, but because the culture around asking made it feel safer to just stop asking. A leave you're afraid to take isn't really a leave. An entitlement you have to apologize for using isn't really an entitlement, even if it's written into your contract.

That's a genuinely different problem from low pay itself. Low pay is a negotiation, and reasonable people can disagree about what a role is worth at a given stage of a company's life. Being made to feel guilty, or quietly at risk, for using something you're legally owed is something else entirely — and I think it deserves to be named as its own problem, not folded into a conversation about salary alone.

Instability that isn't really about market conditions

The other pattern I've noticed is decision-making that doesn't stick — plans and policies changing frequently, sometimes into clearly worse versions of what came before, followed by rounds of hiring and firing that trace back to those reversed decisions rather than any real change in the business itself. From the outside this often gets described as "the market is tough" or "we had to restructure." From the inside, having sat close to a few of these decisions, it's often just inconsistent planning at the top, and the instability that follows lands entirely on the employees who had no part in making the original bad call.

That instability shows up most sharply at the two edges of employment: coming in, and leaving. Hiring and firing frequently happen without much formal notice or procedure — someone is let go abruptly, sometimes without the notice period or documentation they're entitled to, justified after the fact as "the role changed" or "we had to restructure."

But the harder pattern to talk about is what happens when an employee chooses to leave on their own terms. Resignation, in a healthy workplace, is just a decision someone is allowed to make about their own life. In several cases I've witnessed, it instead gets treated as something to be second-guessed, even mourned back at the person who made it. Comments about how this is the worst decision they could be making, how they'll regret it, how the company gave them so much and this is how they repay it — all aimed at someone who has usually already thought it through far more carefully than the person reacting to it.

That kind of response isn't concern. It's an attempt to make someone feel guilty for exercising a choice that was always theirs to make. A resignation deserves to be respected as a decision, not argued with as if it were a betrayal.

Why I think this is worth saying plainly

I'm not writing this to paint an entire industry with one brush — there are teams here that pay fairly, follow labor basics without being asked, and treat "we're growing together" as a two-way commitment instead of a one-way excuse. I've been lucky enough to work with some of them. But I think the pattern I've described is common enough that people early in their careers here deserve to hear it named clearly, instead of discovering it slowly and wondering if they're the only one experiencing it.

If you're working in this industry and recognize this pattern in your own workplace, I don't think the answer is to assume it's just how things are everywhere, or that you're wrong to expect better. A senior-sounding title doesn't replace fair pay. A "we're growing" story doesn't replace a leave policy that actually gets honored. And "startup" was never supposed to be a permanent explanation for why the basics don't apply to you.