winscape 2211

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Well, except for the theory ideas, maybe.

But I'm following up again because it suddenly occurred to me that in a lot of this discussion, I've been thinking about interaction among colleagues in an academic workplace, while you're thinking of a development group, and I think there are some differences that matter for this debate:

In a development group (and I worked in one for a few years, way back when), my limited experience is that people generally have a pretty good idea of each others' abilities based on "real" stuff such as whose code works, who proposes ideas that advance the overall process, who's able to find obscure bugs, and so forth. So people don't have to be too concerned about putting on a good face with their colleagues -- their opinions aren't based on whether you project self-confidence, they're based on real stuff.

In an academic workplace (again in my limited experience, and according to at least one mentor), that might not be the case. If Joe and Sally work in very different research areas, it might be the case that Joe doesn't have the background to understand whether what Sally is doing is any good, and vice versa. So there's a tendency to be influenced what people say about their own work. So if Sally is always telling people "hey, I did something really amazing the other day! I simulated a Whatzit with 1 million Floozles!" and Joe just grouses about how he's been working on trying the prove the same theorem for ten years now, Sally comes across as smart and capable, while Joe comes across as a whiny loser. Of course, if simulating a Whatzit with 1M Floozles is nothing very special, while the theorem Joe's working on is whether P = NP, the truth might be that Joe is doing much better work than Sally (where "better" in this context means "making more of a contribution to his-her field").

In an environment where people's opinions of each other's work can't always be based on "real stuff", how you present yourself to your colleagues matters, and for whatever reason men seem to generally have less trouble blowing their own horns than women, with the result that they're perceived as being slightly better than they really are, while the non-horn-blowers are perceived as being not as good as they really are. Not good, right?

The fix for this, I guess, is for more people, men and women, to be aware that this is happening and to try to give less weight to the horn-blowing. Women can also make a conscious effort to avoid self-deprecating jokes and, well, brag a little more.

Does this maybe make some of my comments seem slightly less, um, divorced from reality?

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-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.