This is the prime example of Law 1 of Robert Greene's "The 48 Laws of Power": "Never Outshine the Master."

The core principle is to always make those above you - your bosses, mentors, or superiors feel comfortably superior.

If you display your talents too aggressively, you risk triggering their deep-seated insecurities, which can lead them to sabotage your career or remove you from your position.

Galileo Galilei handled this really well. When he discovered the moons of Jupiter he strategically named them after the ruling Medici family.

By making the discovery about their greatness rather than his own intellect, he secured their lifelong patronage.

However, if your superior is a "fading star" or is clearly about to fall, you do not need to be merciful. In these cases, it may be strategic to outshine them to hasten their downfall and position yourself as the natural successor.

Sounds like when I was asked to give minimum hardware requirements for something doing backend processing (receive text submitted as print jobs, massage, send to printers).

The requirements as they went out were much higher than they needed to be, because I decided telling them that we weren't stressing anything on the obsolete NT desktop repurposed as the test system might not please everyone.

This was the moment I’ve stopped putting any effort in my work.

IMHO I think the best any engineer can do in an org is to ask "what is the highest value problem to solve for the business" and "can I solve it".

"I made this x times better" is not relevant to _most peoples in any org_.

That's the dark secret. Nobody cares how good of an engineer you are _unless there is a fire to put out_. After which you get pat on the back and back to usual business.

There are situations where years of impeccable, high value diligent work is rewarded.

But what is more common is that the rewards go to those who are in politically expedient position to get the rewards. Favourites, culturally aligned folk, etc. And sometimes it's not even about you or your boss, but the politics in the organization at large. "You are not allowed to promote anyone due to budget" is a very common thing.

So I guess what I mean to say is if as an egineer you want to retain your sanity, when at work focus on maximizing business value. If you know a kick-ass solution that is 10000x better than industry standard go with it but know this - nobody will care! Nobody believes _someone in their org_ could have beaten _industry standard_ unless the org is very unique. What you get is small increase in your reputation - and sadly nobody recognizes how hard that was. Maybe you will meet some other engineer at some point who has tackled that same issue - and then you can bond over the solution.

A large part of software ecosystems is about business, politics, and the large scale impact of technology.

Saying this as an IC whose previous tasks at previous employer could have employed _teams_ but since we were allowed to deal with them smartly it was just me.

So if you know a 10000x solution to a problem many people have - that's a good opportunity to consider can it be productized!

Just smear the heck out of them to stakeholders, after implementing something big and climb over these incompetent shmucks and watch their fall

Unless you were working at a startup full of very naive people, I gotta say this sounds made up.