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I'm at the seniority in my career where I still find stalking flattering. :))) I think in every job you need to (a) do good work, (b) make that work visible. S

I'm at the seniority in my career where I still find stalking flattering. :))) I think in every job you need to (a) do good work, (b) make that work visible. So at least some amount of self-advertisement is good both for the individual and the organization. You would wonder how much time I spend on "stalking" engineers and making their amazing work more visible towards our customers -- giving proper credit during our biweekly demos, of course. Unfortunately, above a certain threshold (say about 20% of your time), self-advertisement is toxic. As far as I could notice, this happens in environments where people feel unsafe. This can happen both in industry and academia. However, you might be right that self-advertisement is more present in academia, given the tendance to assess individuals over teams and given the overall "squeeze". :) Would you agree?

low_tech_love 3y ago
I never worked in the industry, so unfortunately I don’t have a basis for comparison. But in our case (academia in Sweden) I’d say it is certainly not because of lack of safety. If anything, one of my assumptions is that it’s actually the opposite. Since we’re not being judged by merit (at least not in any significance way for better or worse), and there is no easy way to get paid more for extra time or better outcomes, people will inflate their mediocre results to find a way to work less with the same pay.
- anticristi 3y ago
  Interesting hypothesis. I think your hypothesis has some merits. The way salary increases work in Swedish academia is that the union negotiates an average increase over the whole university -- say 2.5%. Then the department head will give some below the average and some above the average. So it's up to you to be "the loudest in the department" to get an above-average increase. Not saying how things should be, just saying how things are.

low_tech_love 3y ago

I never worked in the industry, so unfortunately I don’t have a basis for comparison. But in our case (academia in Sweden) I’d say it is certainly not because of lack of safety. If anything, one of my assumptions is that it’s actually the opposite. Since we’re not being judged by merit (at least not in any significance way for better or worse), and there is no easy way to get paid more for extra time or better outcomes, people will inflate their mediocre results to find a way to work less with the same pay.

anticristi 3y ago
Interesting hypothesis. I think your hypothesis has some merits. The way salary increases work in Swedish academia is that the union negotiates an average increase over the whole university -- say 2.5%. Then the department head will give some below the average and some above the average. So it's up to you to be "the loudest in the department" to get an above-average increase. Not saying how things should be, just saying how things are.