[devhinton]

Could you explain this a bit more and what you mean by 'self-promotion'?

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.

[allochthon]

By self-promotion, I'm thinking of the following kinds of thing:

- 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.

[yason]

Self-promotion, as I would describe it in this context, is simply selling yourself at all. This is highly frowned upon in cultures in the opposite end of the continuum as it comes out phony: "if he's so good then why does he have to underline it himself?" If you really are good, then it's something that's known and you'll hear others (your coworkers, peers, ...) saying the good things about yourself.