[pdpi]

> Credit isn’t something you can steal in the dead of night; everyone knows who did the work.

Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example.

As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that.

At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.

[ryandrake]

Seen the exact same personality at many employers, it's like they all come from the same factory. I can smell it a mile away now.

OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.

[sota4077]

Exactly. I commented to a different person, but I will repeat it here.

Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.

[ryandrake]

And it keeps going. Manager II will tell Manager III "Here are the things my org has done!" and Manager III will tell VP "Here is what my product line has achieved!" and VP will tell CEO "Here is how profitable my business unit is!" and CEO will tell the board and the world "Behold what I have done!"

It's credit-taking all the way up.