About 2 years into my last job my manager had a conversation with me. Apparently, one of the divisions wanted to bring me on to support Outlook for them, which he, had declined for me. Forgetting the matter of "shouldn't I get to make that choice" he was right, I'd never have taken the job. But, to that division, it was how they brought you in and worked you up. They'd done it with a couple of people*. But, in my mind, those people and I were in different leagues. Honestly, it was insulting to my ego.
What there really was, was a disconnect between their culture and ours. They looked at their tools and because of all the brand names felt a sense of superiority to us working with tools they had never heard of. We, on the other hand, looked on that with a sense of accomplishment and pride because we made a pretty rotten system do some fairly cool things. Frankly, I'd rather have been working with the brand names (makes that resume a lot friendlier) but I feel good about what we pulled off. For instance, there's nothing I've seen in the Microsoft BI stack that we couldn't have done.
When the two cultures began to merge, actually it was more like the New World being settled and we weren't the Europeans, well, you can guess what happened. One of the last conversations I had with the president before I left was a "what do you see me doing here in the future?" His response, "leading an Outlook implementation".
Edited: I left out on small piece of the story. By the time I had that conversation, there was no one left to lead.
* To add insult to the injury, one of the guys they did that with is now a VP.
