Hundreds of years ago, I wrote to the Applications Development Manager and proposed that they install SDSF so that the programmers could stop having to wait on the computer room for compiles or sending their output to the 600 lpm data entry printer, where a 9,000 line compile could back up the whole department for 15 minutes, rippling through to make some programmers have to wait a half our or more to see their programs.
His response was to send a note to my boss, who reported to him, asking why I was wasting company paper with this sort of memo. Later, during a severe cost-cutting blitz, he turned in my idea as his own.
Karma:
By the time he submitted my proposal, IBM had upgraded SDSF from a $1,460 OneTimeCharge throwaway product to a $10,000/year development tool, so the savings I predicted, while real, were much smaller.
The end result of all the cost cutting saw him laid off as a cost savings. He went to another company where he got into a tiff with the hired guns from a Big Eight firm over their unethical practices and they had him fired. I found it ironic that the first time he ever took an ethical stand, he suffered for it.