I cannot upvote this hard enough. I have tried to be the positive force I want to see in the world and it's resulted in me being tarred and feathred as a heretic by people who feel threatened by whatever modernization I've been pushing for. It's sad and disappointing as an engineer working on a platform to have the people (management) in charge just NOT GIVE A SHIT about making things better.
Just get more canaries, who cares if they are dying. Stop asking questions, get back to the mine or we'll replace you with someone who won't complain as much. Come to think of it this might be your third strike...
For the young'uns: Mr Pibb used to be this, with more-forward cherry, no hint of pepper, and maybe a little lower acidity. Smoother, cherry-heavy Dr Pepper. I always preferred Dr Pepper, but sometimes Pibb was what I wanted.
Then they turned it into nasty, thick-feeling sugar-syrup so overwhelmingly sweet you can hardly taste anything else (like... two decades ago. "Pibb Xtra").
So if that's all you've ever known and you're like "OMG how is this gross soda a thing?", know that it used to be a lot better.
i make demonstration and breakout boards and release the designs in the _hopes_ that someone influential will start cloning it
one epaper demo board has led to countless companies emailing me asking how they can take their board clone and make it do the bespoke thing they ultimately wanted to make, since the original seller usually has no clue
so maybe give up 90% of your sauce? the last 10% are circumstantial to the taster anyway...
easter eggs are a great way to prove provenance if it comes down to it
When I was a junior dev I created a looping mechanism in a vendor product that wasn't designed to loop. I let the company know via support ticket and they included it in their documentation of the product because they didn't know it could do that either. I never dove deep enough to find something new. Nor did I combine ingredients from different fields. You could call it lucky, but I think I was persistent and didn't know what my limitations were and that's why it happened.
"Greatness awaits those who find secret sauce and share the recipe."
No. No it doesn't. Although I really like the post and the positivity in it. I'm going to have to disagree with that point. Sharing your greatness more often results in some narcissist or psychopath (clinical, not conversational) taking credit for your work. In an era of social media infested domains, derivative work leeches off your effort and its more likely someone you've never met will become known for whatever you invent.
I would recommend finding your secret sauce, iterating on it several times, then once you're further ahead of everyone else, share the first generation and promote that. Keep everyone else running to catch up to you and when they get close blow them out of the water by sharing the next generation ahead of where they are at.