I feel like I understand the author's experience, and his bitterness, I had a very similar situation myself when I was a new engineer, creating an amazing proje

I feel like I understand the author's experience, and his bitterness, I had a very similar situation myself when I was a new engineer, creating an amazing project that was really useful for everyone that got completely shot down for political reasons. For a while after, the more I stuck out with better work the more I was punished. I learned a lot from this. It was very demotivating, painful, even humiliating, and it took me a long time to get over it (mostly). What I didn't learn is that all the people who were to blame for this were the bad guys. Here's what I did learn: - People are people and will do the things that people do, despite your high expectations. - You can often not change other people. But you can change yourself. Think of what *you* can do to improve relationships. - You'll rarely change someone's thinking by using logic. This, sadly, is not human nature in a political environment. - Work is a political environment. Even engineering. - You must learn what motivates, frustrates, encourages, shames and honors the people you work with. - Protect the people you work with, do not cause them to raise their defenses. - If you want something to move forward in a team you must win people over. - You don't win people over by making them feel threatened that you will take power from them or make them look bad. - If you truly care about something, having another person claim that idea as their own isn't bad, it's a great victory. If you don't really care what gets done in your organization and are just interested in being the most well respected and successful person, and want to get there in the quickest and not deal with everyone's crap, then do what a lot of others do and just flatter and lie and job-hop around before things catch up to you and you'll be C-level in no time. You can also get there (but not for sure) through long difficult years of doing everything right. Make your choices.