Considering the OP (original post here), from my decades of experience in working as an employee doing technical work, computing and applied math, in organizati

Considering the OP (original post here), from my decades of experience in working as an employee doing technical work, computing and applied math, in organizations, my main lesson, conclusion, response has been just to start a business, right, exploiting, using computing and, for an advantage, applied math. The computing has some mathematical aspects but is nearly all just routine Microsoft .NET. A general thought is: For someone A to have a good job as an employee, there has to be an employer B who creates that good job. So, if A is pretty good, useful, valuable, etc. for B, then maybe A should just start and run their own business. E.g., the guy who used two old Dell computers as Web servers, wrote software using .NET, and, alone, built the romantic match making service Plenty of Fish. Then he wanted to sell, hired a lot of people, and sold out for $500+ million. He seems to be an example of a lot of advice including "Build and provide something people, maybe a lot of people, want." So, that's what I'm trying to do -- build something a lot of people want. Currently my .NET code is 100,000 lines of typing and 20,000+ programming language statements. I got delayed by some unpredictable, exogenous influences but am making good progress now. But to respond to the OP, my experience being a technical employee is not much like what is in the OP. Here are some lessons from that school of hard knocks: (1) Don't Be Very Good. My experience is that if work to be really good, if are really good, even if just are seen as working hard to be really good, that is commonly seen as a firing offense. Why? If you are good, making important contributions, maybe are close to essential, then you can get some power, and the power can scare nearly everyone else. In simple terms, to some extent, an organization is a fight for power. So, it's a fight. (2) Goal Subordination. Business schools commonly teach a whole course in goal subordination. So the idea is that the organization has goals but a lot of the management subordinates those goals to their own advantage in the power struggle. So, such managers can gain while the organization suffers. Uh, remember this if become a manager of managers! (3) People or Things. There is an old remark, way too simple but still with some truth, still approximately true, possibly a significant factor among many others: "Growing up, boys pay attention to things and girls, to people." Commonly girls and young women are much better with people than boys and young men of the same age. So, the girls (females) can be better at pleasing others, at the OP's "nice to work with". The difference here between the genders can be extensive, say, run wide and deep. (4) Human Resources (HR). The OP mentioned HR: It appears that somehow, to a significant extent, the people in HR can be especially skilled at working with people and especially sensitive to the related issues. So, some guy really good with technical material and things can easily offend the HR people. E.g., early in my career I was hired under a special HR program and occasionally asked HR about the promised evolution of the program. The HR response was somewhat worse than had I been proposing to drop into boiling oil kittens, puppies, and babies, in particular their babies. They arranged to get me fired. We never communicated in English what they were upset about, but still they worked hard to get me fired. In my decades of experience, more generally, commonly in practice "easy to work with" is more about manners in a Victorian Royal garden party than anything about the actual work. Or maybe borrow from a politician who wants to make sure never to offend any group, even a small group, even just one person so always speaks in highly ambiguous statements about widely accepted thoughts, positions, etc.