My understanding is that there is still disagreement around this. One of the lines of debate is whether his wife Mileva Marić did most of the grunt-work that wa

My understanding is that there is still disagreement around this. One of the lines of debate is whether his wife Mileva Marić did most of the grunt-work that was necessary to prepare his papers to the level of acceptance for scientific publications at that time. The overall narrative that seems to emerge is that he was undisciplined as an undergrad at the ETH in Zurich, and never would have landed a graduate posting, and the patent office job was a fallback. Mileva was more diligent and helped him out quite a bit.