[ryandrake]

I used to get so angry about all this credit-taking, but after 20 years, it kind of just washes over me now. Look at every company's "About Us" page and you'll see beautiful headshots of top executives with captions claiming to have "Built product X" or "Developed application Y" when they probably never wrote a line of code in their lives. It's so pervasive in every company that, as an IC, you just have to accept it or you're going to give yourself increasing anxiety until you explode.

[soco]

Well in theory it's quite an adventure to get support and secure funding and generally make something possible, so the credit is not completely misplaced. And like other commenters said, nobody thinks they did that with their own hands. At least nobody in their right minds.

[jdbernard]

The problem is that assumed knowledge is so implicit. If you're not familiar with the norm, it's easy to get confused about what someone actually did. Add to that the inherent desire of our ego to over-inflate our own importance, and misunderstandings don't get corrected.

Personally, I prefer to call out leadership explicitly: "lead teams who built out four data centers."