[ltfey]

In school, you get multiple noisy grades per year but the noise cancels out. That's what averaging does. You might get a B or even a C when you deserved an A, and vice versa, but your grade-point average will, in the long term, approximately reflect what you put into your work.

In corporate, there's just as much noise, but rather than getting smoothed out over time, it accelerates. In corporate, some guy can turn off your income, even though you're good at your job, because a manager wants to show off that he "can make tough decisions" and impress his own manager--either to get a promotion, or to get into someone's pants. It's random and bad things happen for no good reason, and we're prime to just accept that this is "just business" but we shouldn't have to. We can build better systems, by far, than the ones we've got.