@David Piepgrass Sorry to hear about that. I think I've been on both sides of this sort of thing. Sometimes it's hard to articulate exactly why it's not meshing with a particular personality and you just gotta make a decision and move forward even if you can't 100% justify it. Would you say you approach your professional work with the attitude that you're there to take the things that are important to your employer/boss and make them important to you even if it isn't clear why they're important to your employer?

My general attitude was that I wanted the company to succeed long-term, and so I pushed for problems to be fixed that have caused inefficiency (and gotten worse) since the company's MVP around 2011-12. Evidently I wasn't aligned with my bosses, nor did I have a lot of contact with them as they are usually 7 time zones away. I was puzzled why the problems with the software had gone unaddressed for so long; I guess management doesn't appreciate people trying to take the focus away from "next quarter" problems.

That sounds very frustrating. One thing I've learned is that it's not enough to be right about something, but it's equally important to be able to communicate to those who are making the decision why it might be the best way to go forward, and also be open to the idea that there could be factors (not necessarily technical) at play that I'm not considering. I obviously know nothing about your particular situation, but I think often we in the software field expect the "right answer" to be as obvious to others as it sometimes feels to us. It's very difficult, and a very different skill to package up a "right answer" in a way that makes it clear to others. I think that's a big part of what folks working on novel programming ideas struggle with too. A particularly skilled or patient higher-up might be easier to communicate with, but we don't always have such luxury.