I'm dealing with something similar to what the article talks about. I've been with my company for 3 years. I wa shired as a "new college hire." I am ~6 years older than a typical grad and had worked in the industry prior to joining my company.

Ever the course of my time I've:

1. Learned C# in order to rewrite an app I wrote in Java 2. Self-organized a team to implement a UI in HTML/CSS using a JavaScript tool I wrote myself that allowed different team members to work on components a layout and have the partials dynamically reconstructed. 3. wrote a connection pool class in C# from scratch that has been in production for 2 years without a hiccup.

The list goes on. I suppose I've been rewarded by my manager with substantial raises and he always says he notices my work but in 3 years the only responsibility I've had was when I took it on myself to bring coworkers together to implement the UI (which we delivered in 2 weeks as opposed to the 3 months they had blocked for it).

Am I wrong to feel slighted when far less capable people have been promoted to leadership positions? My boss does stuff like take me to events where I'll meet big wigs, but I don't care about that stuff. I just want to be in charge of producing good, maintainable code.