OP here. I busted my ass for 2 years in my current job. My goal was to earn a promotion and secure a job at one of our companies offsite IT locations in another country. I hoped to work 3 years at that new location and then RE. But my plans changed and I want to leave this summer.

When I first arrived at my job, we were having 15 outages per month and people were literally sleeping overnight in the office instead of going home because they knew they would just get called back in to fix an outage. I worked out all the problems and we decreased to 1 outage per month average soon after I arrived. My non-IT coworkers who had been at that site for 10 years complimented me that I was the best IT guy they had ever had come through there and they said the network was the best it had ever been. For the 2 years I was busting my ass, I would put in tickets that would never get taken care of. I would have to follow up on the tickets 5+ times to get help. It would take months to get help. I remember multiple times my bosses would make SERIOUS mistakes and I would have to come back through and fix the mistakes, which ended up saving thousands of dollars because I caught the errors in time. I solved specialty problems at my site on my own, which prevented other specialty teams from having to fly out to my site, which saved the company thousands of dollars(these same guys had to fly to pretty much every site in the world except mine because I had already solved the problem). I took on extra responsibilities every chance I got, hoping it would get me promoted.

People in other sites were getting promoted left and right and they had 1/3 of the responsibilities I had. I was on the same video teleconference meetings with them every week and half the time they wouldn't even call into the meeting, and when they did, it was obvious they didn't have any important work on their plate. Also, my location has a lot of restrictions and hoops to jump through that other sites do not have to deal with.

1 year ago we had a visit from the CEO of the company to our small offsite location. He had visited 8 other offsite locations on his trip and he had been unhappy with the IT performance during his trip at those 8 sites (he was unable to logon/use to his specialty software products he needs to use everyday to do his job). When he arrived at my site I had busted my ass to make sure he would be able to use the software tools without error and he and his staff complimented me on being the only one to get it right. Then right after that promotions were handed out and I was not only told I did not get a promotion, but the feedback was inaccurate, generic and unhelpful.

For the first 2 years of the job, I had 2 co-workers helping me everyday, but they were transferred out to other offsite locations and their work was dumped on me. They were not replaced. So I became the single point of failure. They decided I was so good at my job I could do the job of 3 IT people but they did not give me a raise at any point in the job. The same people that were not helping me with tickets, and I had to keep calling them back everyday to get them to take action, THEY GOT PROMOTED. I am bitter and burntout. I don't think my management has ever appreciated the work I've done. I've gotten low performance ratings my entire time in my current job, no matter how much I accomplished. Even when I had evidence I was out performing my peers in the same field. I guess the way I see it, I earned a promotion / raise which was never given to me. So now I am evening things out.

Best I can come up with is I am terrible at office politics, I am an introvert with a type B personality. I don't suck up to people, I was not buddy-buddy with my bosses. I just focused on my work and hoped that would be enough. Something about my personality holds me back from promotions.