[hga]

Indeed; one of the very most frustrating jobs I ever had, my last at a Lisp company, ended up "pitting" me against a very junior programmer, who was a flurry of obvious activity, including lots of debugging. I put in less hours (but still a lot, it was a pre-launch startup), often took a nap in the afternoon, was much quieter in a way, only asking questions about the code base and e.g. asking for one procedure to be coded in assembler to make the editor we were working on fast enough, etc.

My output of working code and functionality was a lot higher, I removed entropy from the code base (the other guy at best didn't add a lot), and ended up being demoted and then quitting in disgust. In vague mitigation we were reporting to the 3 founders and friends who'd all gone to the same school and this was their first attempt to manage others, but....

I don't know if your situation is akin, but it does sound like there's, realistic or not, an unbridgeable gap between you and your manager(s), and its time to find another job with a better fit before the company takes worse actions.