Great insight and advice I need to take - your description captures my current situation almost to a tee, better than I’ve been able to understand it for myself, so thank you.
In addition to what you described, in my case this engineer quickly recognizes other highly-effective and/or important people, and aggressively tries to build that reputation by privately messaging and even privately demoing work where the recipient has some stake in the outcome.
I would onboard him to a project, sharing all of my tools, key contacts and personal insights, e.g.
“our manager Smith is hinting that there is a big customer interested in X capability, which I’ve discussed with their power user Wilson and product owner Flores informally in recent demos. I think we could use Y approach and want to start prototyping if we get the go-ahead”
This engineer would start messaging Flores, Wilson and Smith privately and schedule calls about X excluding me and other core maintainers to push the thing forward, often proposing Y in his own words.
This strategy worked wonders for him in terms of upward movement. He is a diligent and extremely responsive to important people. But the strong engineers from whom he has effectively stolen credit, or even the opportunity to have a seat at the table in critical early discussions, obviously resent it.
His direct manager is lackadaisical and basically just gets bombarded by this engineer asking for frequent, long 1-1 calls where he shares “his” accomplishments and ideas. I’ve watched this play out in person (we are a remote-only team except for big project-related events) — his manager clearly trying to leave the event after it concluded, keys in hand and facing his car door, everyone else has said goodbye and given space, and this engineer keeps him there talking for no less than 10 more minutes.
I’ve never met someone so comically ambitious and overzealous to be seen as the MVP He was promoted in record time, much to the frustration of stronger and more critical maintainers.
I am baffled by the whole thing, and just laugh at this point. My most charitable interpretation of manager’s actions are that they do recognize the dynamic, and just don’t care because ultimately their job is slightly easier for the meantime. But if any 2+ of the critical core maintainers split in frustration, the whole thing will suffer, badly
ETA: it seems to me that remote-only teams are particularly susceptible to this kind of thing getting out of hand, because the capacity for secret communication is immensely greater