A broad lesson: ASAP don't be an employee and, instead, start and run own business. Actually, working your way up to running, say, four fast food restaurants can be just fine.

Yes, I omitted: The guy at IBM "two levels up" basically just hated me, for no good reason if only because we'd nearly never spoken or interacted at all.

I was told to do some publishable research. Okay, I had some ideas. I thought that the lab should do the core research for valuable, new products, but getting close to a new product was essentially forbidden. So, instead, just to publish, that was plenty easy enough.

So I did the research and wrote it up as an internal working paper. Then the Watson lab claimed that the paper was not publishable.

Of course, out of IBM, I submitted the paper for publication, and it was accepted without revision by the first journal to which I submitted, Information Sciences. It's a nice paper.

IBM's claim that the paper was not publishable was incompetent or a lie.

But the guy two levels up who hated me for no reason did get me out of the company. It cost him his corner office, secretary, budget, etc., but he got me out.

There's more that's nasty, but let's not get into all of that.

Basically, IBM just didn't care about their employees, didn't have much idea what to do with them, and didn't much want them.

In more detail, a lot of middle management didn't much care, and top management was unsuccessful in having middle management care.

For someone who can actually be productive, running their own business is likely a much better path.

If a person is working for a company that doesn't know what the heck to do with them, and/or really doesn't much know what to do that's good at all, then tough for there to be a reason for the company to pay the person enough to be responsible as a husband and father. Instead, the company is perfectly willing to have the employee waste their life and, then, fire them.

For competition from big companies, likely they don't want to have people who could do good work; for such people, the company would likely block the people from doing good work; and a person who did good work anyway would stand a good chance of getting fired.

Net, if are running own business and doing something good, then don't worry much about competition from big companies. This is a very old story.