I agree that a little self-promotion is necessary in corporate America. But I find this to be due to a flaw in American character rather than a virtue. Self-promotion in any context apart from interviews is a little unbecoming in my opinion.
Not to the same degree. A common belief is that the Americans are especially good at self-promoting in comparison to their European counterparts.
Maybe this can be partially explained by the size and nature of the US labour market. The more often one changes jobs and the less likely it is that the new employers knows the previous one (and thus can rely on their testimonial), the less necessary it is for an employee to be able to promote themselves in job interviews.
1) If you are defining self-promotion as 'falsely giving the impression of ability or productivity' then it seems hurtful to any company (I hate seeing undeserving people praised).
2) If you are defining self-promotion as 'giving the impression of ability or productivity' then I do not see any inherent negative value in it.
3) If you are defining self-promotion as 'giving the impression of ability or productivity in order to receive some gain' then I do not know if this negative or positive.
My only experience is as a software engineer and not as a manger, but is there not a problem of little time versus the need to judge?
That is, as a manger do you not need to understand the ability of your employees while at the same time having limited time. In small companies a CTO etc... has little time because there is SO MUCH WORK to get done. I imagine that in larger companies there are too many people (and investment in oversight) to understand the value of each person's ability.
So it seems that self-promotion has served as a solution to this difficulty 'as a leader I need a hand on the pulse of my employees but have little time to do so'. Thus when an employee says 'hey I am good at this', it saves everyone time if they have an accurate understanding of their own ability. The problem in this solution is that it opens the doorway to these 'unsuccessful people.' The real solution is problem not to hire them in the first place (I know, I know, this is not an easy solution). Unless you want to turn your company into the worst place to work ever, will there not always be an opportunity for shitty people to game the system?
My only solace (and this is motivated by my recent reading of Plato's Republic) is that these people cannot possibly, truly be happy. I would think a lot of people who pretend are lazy (which means the rest of their life sucks) or untalented. The only person I have ran into that does this consistently is actually unable to code (not lazy). I hated him until I felt sorry for him. Again, I am drawing a lot of these conclusions from a small sample size.
- I say something subtle or not-so-subtle that I perceive will impress other people concerning my (real) abilities, for the sake of impressing them.
- I intentionally say something that will make me look better than a peer.
Self-promotion is not so easy to define, but it's something you can recognize when you see it. This is behavior that in a previous time we would have thought of as immodest. Americans (I'm one) and others with similar cultural tendencies don't have a sense of how self-promotion comes across to people. Avoiding it is as much a matter of good taste as anything else.
is there not a problem of little time versus the need to judge?
It seems to me that a necessary qualification of a manager is that he or she take the time to understand the strengths and weaknesses of his or her reports at a level sufficient to have an opinion about their contribution, one that is not dependent upon them needing to be flashy in various ways. My sense is that anyone who cannot do this is either too busy or perhaps otherwise not in a good position to supervise a team.
Anyway, alpha people exist everywhere, they just tend to display it differently in another cultures so you don't notice at first.
Also - it's not corporate America only. The world isn't that different.
That doesn't sound bad. Why shouldn't they be reluctant to adopt new technologies and new behaviors?
What they already use is "tried and tested", the other has what going for it? The novelty aspect?
Have you considered the reasons behind self-promotion? What purpose does it serve? What circumstances allow self-promotion to exist, and what makes it necessary? How would the world look without this flaw, once the changes have propagated? Why is it a flaw?
All good questions. I don't know for sure what it's rooted in and what it serves. I've lived abroad, and modesty is the norm for the most part, rather than selling oneself, and there's something refreshing in that. (But self-promotion isn't just an American thing, so one can't overgeneralize here.)
A corporate environment in which self-promotion was no longer necessary would look very different. For one, people with responsibility for decisions about promotions would be more observant.
This becomes a high bar for managers. They must effectively cancel the effects of self promotion, so that rational employees move away from it. Then, assuming managers are at least ideally rational, something would have to motivate them to behave this way in turn.
If we were serious about removing this flaw in the system, we'd have to change a lot of other things to make room for it. It's easy to evaluate any one aspect of a system, but be careful not to abandon deeper analysis once the flaws have been found.
there are so many people at my job who i look at and think "why were they exempt from a rigorous tech interview... because of seniority? they're completely in over their head"
yet those people are valued above actual competent employees!! because they run their mouths 24/7.
the BEST thing that could ever happen to the tech sector is for recruiters and hiring managers to actually develop metrics for judging candidates that equate to success -- some mix of syntax knowledge, creativity, ideas about efficiency in terms of work processes/philosophy
the reason so many of these goobers are out there is because the tech world is largely just "how many buzzwords do you know" and "can you fake your way through a tech exam" (which, as i've mentioned, a lot of the older folks are exempt from for some reason anyway). odd. very odd.