Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?
Success, praise and even salary are not a zero sum game.  You will never have a job where they say, &quot;You&#x27;re such a good employee, we&#x27;ll give you <i>all</i> of the money&quot;.  You get a portion and that portion is really negotiable.  It&#x27;s the same with praise.  If you do something amazing then people will probably notice, even if someone else is also doing something amazing.  If you are on a baseball team and your rival hits 100 home runs in a season, they will rightly be praised.  If you also hit 100 home runs in a season, you will also be praised.<p>However, sometimes you&#x27;ll think, &quot;What I did is better than them, but I don&#x27;t get paid as much or receive as much praise&quot;.  This is difficult to deal with.  First you have to consider: <i>why</i> are their results paying off more than yours?<p>To be clear, even if motivated by jealousy, you should think about this.  Jealousy is your mind&#x27;s way of telling you that it is unhappy about some perceived lack of &quot;fairness&quot;.  If you ignore it, you mind is going to find some other way to make you deal with the problem.  You don&#x27;t want it doing that.  Deal with the feelings as soon as you can!<p>The first possibility you should consider: Maybe you are wrong.  Maybe what they did was actually better than what you did.  If you don&#x27;t think so, then try to duplicate it.  If you think that it&#x27;s really out of whack, then you should be able to do it.  You can even tell people, &quot;I thought what X did was really interesting and I want to see if I can do it too&quot;.  If you succeed in doing it, then it will be interesting to see if you get the same results.  If you do not succeed, you can learn about yourself.<p>Sometimes you misunderstand the challenge.  For example, let&#x27;s say a rival wrote a popular open source library and not only does everybody in the company use it, but it&#x27;s super popular outside the company.  You look at the library and think, &quot;That&#x27;s actually a piece of crap.  I could do better&quot;.  And you do!  But it get&#x27;s ignored -- not just by your company, but everywhere in the world.  It is easy to overlook that the skill in making a reuse library is not in writing the library.  It&#x27;s in getting people to actually reuse the code in it!<p>Sometimes it&#x27;s really the case that some people get rewarded more than they should.  Sometimes it&#x27;s because they are friends&#x2F;relatives of the people in power.  However, sometimes it&#x27;s because their attitude just aligns better with the people in power.<p>I once had a really bad manager.  I went to my year end review with a huge list of accomplishments.  My manager said, &quot;Ordinarily if I had someone with this list of accomplishments I would give them a good review.  However, I just don&#x27;t like you&quot;.  Of course I quit.  I probably should have sued the company for constructive dismissal, but when I thought hard about it I realised that my terribly manager had given me a good gift.<p>What was undeniable was that I had made my horrific manager&#x27;s life miserable.  Every time they made a terrible mistake, I <i>told</i> them about the mistake (Oh... it happened a lot, let me tell you).  When they denied it, I waited until I had proof and then came back and showed them that it <i>really was</i> their cock up that made everything go pear shaped.  Of <i>course</i> he hated me.  I would have too :-).  I was trying (in my own way) to help, but really I just drove the poor guy into a well of imposter syndrome and poured daily despair on his head.  I didn&#x27;t help him <i>at all</i> because I didn&#x27;t help him in the way he needed to be helped.<p>I&#x27;ve found that this last thing really is the most tricky thing to get right.  It&#x27;s not enough to be successful.  It&#x27;s not enough to do good work.  You <i>also</i> have to do it in the way that helps your management the most.  Some people intuitively know what that is -- that&#x27;s called talent.  One of my biggest assets is that for my entire life I&#x27;ve lacked such talent and so I&#x27;ve been forced to learn through bitter experience why things work the way they do.  And having done so, I can reason about it effectively, where my talented coworkers are often clueless.<p>So use your jealousy and learn about the world! It&#x27;s fascinating.  Over time, you may find (like me) that the puzzle over why some things are popular is more interesting than worrying about why your work isn&#x27;t more popular.  Cheer on your successful coworkers because that first success may have been a fluke.  If not, though, you have an invaluable source for learning about success.