You're in an office, or the way I like to think of it - a tribe of "professionals". Like all tribes you have people who hunt, gather, tan leather, and make dinn

You're in an office, or the way I like to think of it - a tribe of "professionals". Like all tribes you have people who hunt, gather, tan leather, and make dinner. The "best" hunter occasionally will bring back a deer, maybe once a week. The stable hunter brings back 15 fish every day; aka they feed the tribe consistently. People recognize and praise the deer hunter more. Even if they bring back less food, they are visual and there is a celebration when a deer is brought back. Meanwhile the person bringing back fish, well, they feed the tribe, but it's consistent and not flashy. To your post: > I've been doing a lot of work to clean up the debt that was accumulated and, meanwhile, I improved the reliability and the efficiency of the infrastructure. I wrote common components and library to avoid duplication and shared it with wiki pages on how to implement certain things correctly. First, it sounds like you may have done unnecessary optimizations (aka not a "good" job at delivering real business value). I'm not saying that's the case, but always be wary of "delivering" what no one asked for. At the very least, you didn't bring back a deer, you delivered a steady stream of fish. It actually appears like you built a new net, but at the same time catch the same number of fish. Second, it appears the deer hunter has already been made chief (aka manager), and you're still catching fish. So now it's your job (if you want to stay there) to figure out how to work together. Explain what you'd like to do, and where you'd like to go. As a manager it's his responsibility to work with you to achieve those goals. Move to be the next deer hunter, and learn from the chief on how to get there. Clearly, they appear to be better at distributing the work and / or self-promoting. Ask them to promote you too, work with them to ensure you're being promoted as well. As a manager, they can only be as successful as their underlings. Use that value you create to benefit both of you. At this point it's not a zero sum game. Both of you can move up the ranks, albeit in different paths. Looking for a new job is also an option, but in any case. You need to refocus, you were out maneuvered politically -- you lost. However, it doesn't appear your goal was to manage, you thought bringing in the regular solid work would promote you. It doesn't, solid development does nothing, achieving business goals and sharing it is the key. Keep in mind taking an open source library and distributing it often brings more value to the company than new development. The person who distributes that library is far more likely to get promoted (open source or internally developed - it doesn't matter).