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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

> The education system provides fairly clear and predictable paths to affirmation, success, and a sort of grade based people ranking system.

> Life outside that system often very much does not.

Work does. There are salaries, titles, a hierarchical structure. Plenty of people get sucked into the cycle of wanting "just a little more" salary, recognition, promotions, reports. Not very different from a videogame addiction, where as soon as you level up you start feeling the desire if reaching the next step.

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Succeeding at work is often way more nebulous than succeeding in school. School is entirely based on tests and homework with transparent grading systems and syllabi.

Work is so much more relationship-based. It's not just about doing what your told, but also about collaborating and communicating and leveraging a network, mentoring peers, and generally getting things done for which there is no clear path.

I always felt "leadership" was a meaningless buzzword in school (especially since it had no impact on grades), but now that I'm working I can see it's a real valuable skill and essential to motivating others to do good work.

In school everyone gets the same assignments and has to take the same test. At work there's a subjective element to performance, where everyone has different assignments, and everybody has different ideas about how hard everybody else's assignments are. In school you don't have to report all the things you've done and how valuable and difficult they are.

Word certainly does for some people although being one of the "gifted" types at work seems to provide fewer chances to be that. Teacher's can give out As left and right and even if they give them to everyone, people feel pretty good about it.

Also the scale of affirmation at work can vary wildly.

Granted every workplace is different.

Yes, but salaries, titles, etc. do not necessarily correlate with performance. Nepotism, "CEO is friends with my dad", and other factors completely unrelated to performance are often the source of those things.

Good grades, generally speaking, are immune to any such influence.

Have you heard about the US college admissions scandal? Surely academia must be flawless, pristine in regard for the moral high ground based on your assumption, and surely they don't have all the pitfalls that every other walk of life has.

Homework has been known to be done by others students, or parents even. In higher academia, how many people on a project really lean in to contribute? Maybe 2 out of 5.

Graduate school may be slightly more immune to this, but the barrier to entry is also much much higher monetarily for most.

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