Out of college, I worked at an engineering company and was an extremely fast programmer that built lots of cool things. I was quickly recognized by the leadersh

Out of college, I worked at an engineering company and was an extremely fast programmer that built lots of cool things. I was quickly recognized by the leadership, and got an "engineer of the month" award at a company-wide meeting. Despite it being "of the month", they only did this twice a year. I was happy about it, called my mom and told her the news. What I didn't realize is that a large group of senior engineers were not to happy about it. The went through every one of my commits, identified every time I broke a validation, broke the build, or otherwise caused someone else a headache, and then took this information to management without me knowing about it. I'm sure jealousy may have played a factor, but today, I largely think they were correct. I was a cowboy coder fast and loose with my code. When I broke the build, even if was for 10 minutes before I fixed it, I basically stopped a dozen or more engineers from being productive. It took time, but I learned how to be more of a team player. I created my own build environment that would only commit changes if everything passed, and built a far more robust validation system. Quickly I changed from being the biggest cause of bugs, to the biggest reporter of bugs in the company. Finding and reporting bugs in other people's code also did not help my standing. The truth is that any organization is made up of humans, and simply being the most efficient at creating new features, building validation systems, or reporting bugs, is not going to be enough. You have to actually talk to your peers, build a relationship and a mutual respect and trust.