[BeetleB]

> This is a European perspective. I doubt that things would’ve gone this badly if I was American. My way of thinking seems to fit better there (though I could be wrong).

You are wrong, unfortunately. There's a reason for the saying: "The A students work for the B students, the C students run the business, and the D students get the buildings named after them."

A less cynical take is that in school, marketing skills (e.g. self-promotion and self-inflating) are irrelevant. In industry, they are at least on par with technical skills, and in most roles I've encountered, even more important. Look at the people you know who were fired (directly or made miserable enough to leave voluntarily): People are more likely to get fired for not understanding and exploiting social dynamics than for being poor in the technical arena.

Also, in school, they care about objective evaluation, and usually your performance is not dependent on others. At work, your work is heavily dependent on others, and almost no one tries to objectively evaluate your work (unless you're in sales or something).

[b9a2cab5]

But if you've done research or tried to get a recommendation letter, you know self-promotion and self-inflating also matters in academia. Especially if you go to a large public school.

> objectively evaluate your work

I suppose if you're talking about code quality et. al, yes, but you definitely do get evaluated on its impact on the business. If you are part of a successful product launch and you engineered major features (even if other people could've written those features) you get rewarded.

[BeetleB]

I wasn't referring to academic jobs, but being a student. I don't need recommendation letters to get an A or to learn.

> I suppose if you're talking about code quality et. al, yes, but you definitely do get evaluated on its impact on the business. If you are part of a successful product launch and you engineered major features (even if other people could've written those features) you get rewarded.

A few remarks:

If you do something fairly major, then probably yes.

If you do something fairly major, there will often be people around you who will attempt (and often succeed) to take a fair amount of that credit without having contributed much. So yes, you get rewarded, but so will others who shouldn't. This is very common where I've worked. I think it's generally the case in large companies.

We should not focus on major product launches where you did major work. Say there is an existing product and most of the work is bug fixing and adding features. This category is where most of the work in industry is, and is where my comment mostly applies. This is also the category where innovation is highly touted but rarely rewarded. I've certainly been in jobs where innovation is needed, but the one who steps up to solve those problems is often the one who gets poor reviews, because everyone in the team becomes more productive because of him, and the manager sees less output from him because he spent a big chunk of his time solving infrastructure issues.

When I speak of objectively measuring performance, people often compare how it's done between jobs. This is not the point. Compare with how it's done when you were a student. In most technical courses, it's highly unlikely that someone who barely understands the material gets an A grade while simultaneously the one who understood the material well gets a B or a C. In industry, this scenario is quite common.