Have you ever had a colleague undermine you or do something to get ahead of you on the ladder or receive the recognition over you?
I’ve heard from a few that this field can be brutally competitive and people frequently mow others down in persuit of power and success. Explain a time this has happened to you?

except from management and bosses I can't tell I've seen such behaviour...maybe if they did something that I've missed...

My coworkers have always been cooperative and generally nice people.

Im sure there is competition in some companies. I havent personally experience it myself in any of my employments but I know someone working in a different field where the company bonuses and reward system is completely built to promote back stabbing and competition.

So in general, if a company tells you that you can "easily" make even few thousand more if you put your head down and do great work, that's code for "if you do good job, you might get bonuses, but since everyone here is doing unpaid overtime already, it is completely expected of you too, or else you will be labeled as lazy"

So yeah, depends on the culture

actually I do remember one case. I just got returned to work 4 the evil boss and started making his site responsive ( along w/ fixing their sec holes ( they where hacked 3-4 times for the year and half w/ who knows how many cc stolen ) ) and I made fast check w/ some inline styling. was working on my tests so I left it there until I figure the rest of the highly dynamic page ( read html generated from PHP an JS... ) and in the next moment the so called lead dev comes to the devs chat ( where the boss is too ) and starts complaining about me and that inline style I've put ( despite whole site been littered with it )...soon after he left w/ excuse he is ill and can't work w/ screens anymore and went to live and work at the capital...I can understand him partially...that mess and that boss...

I have not experienced it, my collegues have been either nice or incompetent enough to not pull something like that off ;)

@We3D heh yeah it’s always the people at the top that are assholes

If you are looking for such behaviour the look no futher than in the banking/insurance business. In a dev environment you are very unlikely to find something like this unless the company actively promotes such behaviour. (Hire and fire, handing out large bonuses to asslickers, etc.)