Of all the observations of social dynamics in this thread; this one was so on point that I had to follow up with some sort of affirmation; it&#x27;s a good point to think about and to watch for in people, whether that&#x27;s yourself (and I&#x27;ve certainly had to) or your people as a manager, due to the symptoms this situation can breed.<p>To provide some context for while I feel this is important, when I first moved into BigCO, there was a period of reorgs in my org entirely out of the control of anyone not in &quot;the powers that be&quot;.  As such; there was a &quot;generation&quot; of new engineers brought in as juniors who were laterally moved multiple times in a few years.  New engineers continued to be brought in, but due to the promotion structure of the org, a lateral transition essentially &quot;resets&quot; you, so new grads were coming in at the same level of people who had been delivering for years.<p>Now; there&#x27;s another discussion if this relates to the &quot;3x engineer&quot; thing, which I wasn&#x27;t even going to get into, but for practical purposes these engineers WEREon average performing multiple X better simply by nature of domain experience and rampup.  This resulted in different symptoms from different people; the more zen of my peers simply got saddened about feeling looked over for promotions and started considering other options.  Many left for other companies.  The less zen (myself included) got more &quot;fierce&quot; as a sister post elsewhere put it, realizing that to &quot;catch up&quot; with the career track, high visibility, high impact projects were needed, and that required pushing harder.<p>To bring some sort of conclusion out of this rambling mess;  I&#x27;m not sure your statement of &quot;vicious&quot; is the right word, but needing to stand out from that set seems to be an inevitable consequence of how many promotion structures are built, and being aware of this dynamic, engineers can be both better at their job by staying on top of their internal responses and keeping them productive (why I differentiate &quot;fierce&quot; and &quot;vicious&quot;; you can have the former without the latter I think), and Managers can better stay on top of their team dynamic and keep employees happy by realizing these emotions happen, since I find it&#x27;s an oft under-appreciated dynamic.<p>Man that ended up being FAR more of an essay than I intended.  Hope there was at least one well expressed thought in there.