Here I just want to share a story about how my friend dealt with his boss’s favoritism.
It seems that there is always one particular co-work in your office who always gets the plum job and gain high visibility while you have to slave on those dirty background work all the time without much credit. Maybe you can talk with your boss how to get those high-profile projects with the positive attitudes if he can listen to you and play fair. Otherwise, job-hopping – that is probably what I would do. I am just so bad at office politics games, but not everyone is like me.
I have a friend, who is really cool and smart. He never let emotions get the best of him and he never gives up. He once had a big axx-hole manager who shoveled all the dirty trivia work to my friend and snatched the good and easy ones for him and his favorites, although my friend was technically much better than them.
Once the manager got a high profile project and they had a major design flaw inside it. My friend realized it but he didn’t say anything about it during the development phrase. It seemed that he was totally buried under his own bullshit work. Actually he was closely watching the progress of the project. The blunder didn’t hit the manager until the very last minute. The case was already becoming super hot and sticky and no one knew how to fix it. That manger was totally chewed out by his supervisors. And his favorites were just finger pointing each other to shun the responsibilities. It was a huge mess that cried for a huge mop. Then my friend stood up and came to the rescue. He brought up his solution that he had been thought for a long time. Of course, he was smart enough to not act that way. Anyway, the issue finally got resolved with one or two weeks extension time. But this was already much better than the original expectation of the over-all redo. My friend became a hero with super high visibility.
Then what happened next?
My friend now is the manager who can have his own favorites. :)