I've had disastrous outcomes going by credentials for leadership positions and these days only hire for demonstrated results on a real-world project.
Just my personal anecdotal evidence points me towards stellar academic success having a slight negative correlation with on-the-job performance. People who prefer building things with impact over citation rubber points usually don't survive in academia long enough for enduring a PhD.
This is the biggest problem with fresh graduates.
It’s my biggest problem, both with people who want trendy frameworks, and myself who was bored with work in my younger years (til I started drinking and made changes and created my company). “From a million dollars, anything is your passion” is quite true (was it Joel on Software?), but IT is quite boring when evolving at the lower levels.
I’ve loved the book “Tribal leadership” which defines levels of career,
1-Almost dropout;
2-Bored worker (apathetic victim, but delivers work - This was me);
3-Working like an as but executing on your own skills (“lone warrior” - This is me now);
4-Executes well with a mentor above and mentoring below, which pushes the organization forward by “belonging” to the social fabric;
5-Executes for others - Creates relationship between people so they can execute together - that’s the “startup ecosystem” or corporate leader style, those people often look like gurus amazed by the smartness of people in their ecosystem, which, if they are contagious and humble, becomes true leadership.
There is a misunderstanding between where on the abstraction layer you are standing and how smart you are. The commonplace along mathematicians is that, as we are standing pretty low, we are the smartest of them all, and since there is basically no interaction with people in other layers, this belief gets comfortably reinforced.
Smarts comes in different flavors, and realizing that yours is just one of many and does not work at all in other contexts is hard. Treating others like morons and acting bored is a lousy way to deal with it.