Success, praise and even salary are not a zero sum game. You will never have a job where they say, "You're such a good employee, we'll give you all of the money". You get a portion and that portion is really negotiable. It's the same with praise. If you do something amazing then people will probably notice, even if someone else is also doing something amazing. If you are on a baseball team and your rival hits 100 home runs in a season, they will rightly be praised. If you also hit 100 home runs in a season, you will also be praised.

However, sometimes you'll think, "What I did is better than them, but I don't get paid as much or receive as much praise". This is difficult to deal with. First you have to consider: why are their results paying off more than yours?

To be clear, even if motivated by jealousy, you should think about this. Jealousy is your mind's way of telling you that it is unhappy about some perceived lack of "fairness". If you ignore it, you mind is going to find some other way to make you deal with the problem. You don't want it doing that. Deal with the feelings as soon as you can!

The first possibility you should consider: Maybe you are wrong. Maybe what they did was actually better than what you did. If you don't think so, then try to duplicate it. If you think that it's really out of whack, then you should be able to do it. You can even tell people, "I thought what X did was really interesting and I want to see if I can do it too". If you succeed in doing it, then it will be interesting to see if you get the same results. If you do not succeed, you can learn about yourself.

Sometimes you misunderstand the challenge. For example, let's say a rival wrote a popular open source library and not only does everybody in the company use it, but it's super popular outside the company. You look at the library and think, "That's actually a piece of crap. I could do better". And you do! But it get's ignored -- not just by your company, but everywhere in the world. It is easy to overlook that the skill in making a reuse library is not in writing the library. It's in getting people to actually reuse the code in it!

Sometimes it's really the case that some people get rewarded more than they should. Sometimes it's because they are friends/relatives of the people in power. However, sometimes it's because their attitude just aligns better with the people in power.

I once had a really bad manager. I went to my year end review with a huge list of accomplishments. My manager said, "Ordinarily if I had someone with this list of accomplishments I would give them a good review. However, I just don't like you". Of course I quit. I probably should have sued the company for constructive dismissal, but when I thought hard about it I realised that my terribly manager had given me a good gift.

What was undeniable was that I had made my horrific manager's life miserable. Every time they made a terrible mistake, I told them about the mistake (Oh... it happened a lot, let me tell you). When they denied it, I waited until I had proof and then came back and showed them that it really was their cock up that made everything go pear shaped. Of course he hated me. I would have too :-). I was trying (in my own way) to help, but really I just drove the poor guy into a well of imposter syndrome and poured daily despair on his head. I didn't help him at all because I didn't help him in the way he needed to be helped.

I've found that this last thing really is the most tricky thing to get right. It's not enough to be successful. It's not enough to do good work. You also have to do it in the way that helps your management the most. Some people intuitively know what that is -- that's called talent. One of my biggest assets is that for my entire life I've lacked such talent and so I've been forced to learn through bitter experience why things work the way they do. And having done so, I can reason about it effectively, where my talented coworkers are often clueless.

So use your jealousy and learn about the world! It's fascinating. Over time, you may find (like me) that the puzzle over why some things are popular is more interesting than worrying about why your work isn't more popular. Cheer on your successful coworkers because that first success may have been a fluke. If not, though, you have an invaluable source for learning about success.