Ask HN: Will I have moments in my career like the one I just had in college? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will I have moments in my career like the one I just had in college?

1 pointadmiral334 comments

I go to Rutgers - graduating in May.

There was a 5 person semester long group project for a database class. I tried to communicate and arrange meetups in the earlier stages of the project, but they quickly became distant and I wound up doing the entire thing.

General description -> ER model -> Schema -> RDS/EC2 on AWS -> JSP code and debugging -> submission.

It is the largest portion of the grade. We got an A on the project. I got a C+ in the class, the rest of my group mates got A's and B's.

Usually I don't pay much attention to final grades, but this one got to me. I am generally a poor test taker, and accepted that a long time ago. However having the rest of my group mates receive a better ~grade~ than me, might be representative of having other team mates make more ~income~ than me in the future. Especially because if the professor did a quick analysis on our group, it would appear that I was most likely the low performer on the project.

Do any of you have any similar experiences in your career? How did you handle them?

Thanks

Yes and No.

Yes, performance ratings and pay are not always fair, and there will be people with less skill who contribute less who nevertheless get promoted more and make more money than you. You'll be happier just letting that slide - worry more about whether you are happy with your own pay and position, not how you compare to others.

On the other hand, no, people who completely slack on projects and simply do not do anything will typically be noticed and removed.

But not always - the scope and timeframe of a career is far different than school. Someone who is a slacker on your project may be busy and performing extremely well on other projects, and you will have zero knowledge or visibility into that. Everyone has a broader scope to their work that you see, and they might be doing poorly in the areas where you intersect, but rocking it in other areas, which is why they are getting good reviews despite not being helpful to you. There is always more to the story.

One angle is that they might have prioritised working towards a good grade in the class rather than spending too much time chasing a good grade on the project because that was more valuable.

Seeing things that way and developing such strategies is exactly how things work in business/work.

Injustices happen at work, but not the same way.

The good news for you is that work is all group projects and no tests. You also don't have people completely abandon their responsibility like college students do.

What makes you "bad" at tests? Do you need more time?

I know some super smart people who fail tests because of perfectionism linked to OCD or OCPD. There are many learning disabilities that people have and don't know about, too.

This is how everything works.

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