Narcissistic College Graduates In the Workplace?

SpuriousLogic writes "I work as a senior software engineer, and a fair amount of my time is spent interviewing new developers. I have seen a growing trend of what I would call 'TV reality' college graduates — kids who graduated school in the last few years and seem to have a view of the workplace that is very much fashioned by TV programs, where 22-year-olds lead billion-dollar corporate mergers in Paris and jet around the world. Several years ago I worked at a company that did customization for the software they sold. It was not full-on consultant work, but some aspects of it were 'consulting light,' and did involve travel, some overseas. Almost every college graduate I interviewed fully expected to be sent overseas on their first assignment. They were very disappointed when told they were most likely to end up in places like Decater, IL and Cedar Rapids, IA, as only the most senior people fly overseas, because of the cost. Additionally, I see people in this age bracket expecting almost constant rewards. One new hire told me that he thought he had a good chance at an award because he had taught himself Enterprise Java Beans. When told that learning new tech is an expected part of being a developer, he argued that he had learned it by himself, and that made it different. So today I see an article about the growing narcissism of students, and I want to ask this community: are you seeing the sorts of 'crashing down to Earth' expectations of college grads described here? Is working with this age bracket more challenging than others? Do they produce work that is above or below your expectations of a recent college grad?" We discussed a similar question from the point of view of the young employees a few months back.

Comments

Oh they'll crash all right

[JustShootMe]

... until the bosses have the same mindset, at which point we're all screwed.

Re:Oh they'll crash all right

[h4rm0ny]

I'm dealing with a manager who exhibits a high degree of narcissistic personality traits. In filling a recent vacancy for a software developer he interviewed two candidates. One a highly friendly and right noise-making guy and one a very professional, modest and highly competent person with a lot of direct experience in exactly the technology we use. It was no surprise to anyone when he appointed the one that threatened his sense of superiority least, i.e. the less capable one.

A month after appointing this person, he's shown little work ethic - bugging me with useless chatter repeatedly and not engaging with the simple orientation tasks he's been give and when after a month to work on this task he presents his work, he crumbles at the simplest baby questions. He's been hired to work on your standard PHP / MySQL combo. When asked to write a basic query to select a row from a single table, he couldn't do it. He didn't even understand the principle of a foreign key after it was explained to him multiple times. I later asked him to update the contents of a row and he couldn't even come close to that. And I find it even more dumbfounding that he tries to bullshit his way out of this.

The manager's reaction? He finds it hillarious. He's little focused on the actual success of the team and mainly focused on his relationships with people. I'm currently training this new developer in the basics of SQL and database design (we reached JOINs last week) but I might decide to kill him in the hopes of getting a replacement that can code.

Re:Oh they'll crash all right

[commodore64_love]

>>>If I value your skills more than I value X dollars per year, then that's what I'll be willing to pay you. If they won't work for less than X + 10000 dollars per year, we don't have a deal and I'll keep my money.

Given the current economy I was considering standing at the local interstate on-ramp with this sign:

"Engineer - Will work for food or minimum wage."

Ironically this is the technique our local politicians use to get elected - "Smith for State Senate". ;-) - I visited my alma mater recently, and I was stuck by how much changed in just ten years time. The students are doing "cool" projects that I can only dream of doing in the real world. (Example - Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash.) It makes me wonder if they will be disappointed with their first jobs, which will mostly consist of sitting at a cubicle all day and writing documents.

In the effort to "sell school" I think some engineering programs are giving students the wrong impression of what the engineering career is really like.

Re:Oh they'll crash all right

[aamcf]

Heh, I'm already there, kind of.

A big chunk of my job involves writing perl scripts that produce reference documentation by parsing the C and C++ code the developers write. And, or reasons of irony, I almost always fail to document those scripts.

Re:Oh they'll crash all right

[INT_QRK]

Look, people always find it diverting to swap war stories from the left-hand side of that old Bell Curve. Truth be told, what I see more often than not are bright earnest youngsters filled with great angst over whether college has prepared them enough for the "real world." So, they try hard to learn the job and fit in with the team, especially when the team meets them anywhere near half way. It's been my experience that with even the most modest efforts towards applying basic leadership skills, you get a full up round in no time. My recommendation is to avoid hiring the obvious jerks, and treat the ones who get through with decency and respect, while both challenging them and mentoring them to the challenge (not as hard as you think), and you'll get more than your money's worth.

Re:Oh they'll crash all right

[DerekLyons]

I visited my alma mater recently, and I was stuck by how much changed in just ten years time. The students are doing "cool" projects that I can only dream of doing in the real world. (Example - Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash.) It makes me wonder if they will be disappointed with their first jobs, which will mostly consist of sitting at a cubicle all day and writing documents.

I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it?

How is sitting in a cubicle and writing documentation in your field not using your education? Like the guy upthread who envisioned himself in R&D, you don't seem to realize that even the coolest of jobs entail 10% cool and 90% uncool.
 
Even if you are in R&D - you'll spend a lot of time doing uncool drone work. You've got to plan what you are going to do and how, and then document what did happen after you do it. "Cool" projects, like those discussed by the OP (as well as the increasing trend toward edutainment in primary education), give the student a seriously warped view of what the real world is like. And leads straight towards the narcissistic attitude that spawned this discussion.
 
 

Education is dumb because you work really hard to accumulate all this knowledge only to be placed in management and never use it again.

If you're the kind of manager that doesn't use the experience and education you've accumulated - you're the kind of clueless manager that leads other engineers to pin Dilbert cartoons up in their cubicles.

Re:Oh they'll crash all right

[dcollins]

That's why as part of the interview team you need to set up some programming tests that constitute basic pass or fail. Like: do basic CRUD in a pseudo language of your choice. Reverse a string of characters in a pseudo code.

Personal anecdote: Make sure the guy doing the interview can understand the solution. I was at a job interview and asked to convert an ASCII digit string to its decimal equivalent integer. So I said "easy" and just threw down the standard solution from my numerical analysis textbook (basically: int total; for i = 0 to strlen(s) {total = total*10 + s[i]-'0';}, which is the most efficient way to do it, as is done in java.lang.Integer or any other standard library). Guy says "no, that's wrong, you have to start from the back", and (amazed) I have to start stepping him through the more efficient, standard solution.

I did not get the job, bugged the hell out of me ever since -- to this day I don't think he actually understood the solution.

Re:Oh they'll crash all right

[khellendros1984]

I suppose that's how I got my job. My grades themselves...not stellar. But my manager realized that I actually *got* the ideas and gave a damn about using them as well as learning new ones. So now under a year later, I'm implementing some of the main functionality for our next software release. My education gave me ideas. I got hired for taking the ideas from class and running with them to me own ends.

As a young college graduate...

[Talgrath]

Perhaps I'm just more realistic than the average college graduate, but I'd really just...like a job. I knew, coming in, that whatever I learned in college was just the tip of the iceberg; if getting a BS in Computer Science really prepared you for everything you might see in the "real world" then why are there Masters and Doctorate programs? I will admit that a lot of my fellow college students thought that they are geniuses for one reason or another, but I'm under no such delusions. Hell, in this economy, I'd just like a steady IT job; but it has been remarkably hard to find one with the market flooded with more experienced individuals.

They give you a false impression in school..

[spiffmastercow]

I graduated with a CS bachelors a few years ago thinking I would have a good shot at doing some compiler design or maybe kernel hacking.. despite the fact that I had only done these kind of things in a sterile learning environment that did not at all simulate the level of complexity involved in modern languages and operating systems.. So when I got out of school, I found out that, rather being able to get a job doing these kinds of things, I was lucky to get a web app programming job.

I'm not bitter. I should have realized this from the beginning. But I really wish someone would have pointed out to me that this was what the job market was actually like, so that I could have gone the EE route instead.

The real issue: "seniority" based pay

[Anonymous Coward]

A big part of life is seeing your options narrow as you grow older. There was a time when it was a (very remote) possibility that I could make the Olympic team. Now, I'm simply too old. On the plus, I now have a wonderful wife and daughter so I now know I'm not going to spend my entire life alone (there was a time when that was also a possibility).

So, some guy fresh out of college thinks he might be the next Bill Gates? Maybe he will be. Who are you to say that he won't? It does happen. A few years down the road, when this guy's options have narrowed, you and he might both agree that it's just not going to happen.

But why the need to stomp on some guy's dreams right this second? Particularly when, as you describe it, that dream involves something as simple as not wanting to live in Decater, IL or Cedar Rapids, IA. There are an awful lot of people who do manage to "live the dream" of not having to live in the Midwest. And, if all your new employees really want to live in Los Angeles, why not open a branch office in Los Angeles?

But the real issue here seems to be seniority based pay. The article linked by the summary mentions college graduates wanting more than "entry level" pay. Well, I've seen an awful lot of situations where two guys are doing exactly the same job but one guy is getting paid a whole lot more because of "seniority". That really doesn't seem fair to me (it also doesn't seem fair that management pays itself so much more than the people doing the actual work, but that's another topic).

Anyway, it may be overwhelmingly naive but it's hardly narcissistic to expect the same pay for the same job - and, reading between the lines, that seems to be the real issue here. "How dare those young whippersnappers expect to be paid as much as me - the 'senior' developer?" Maybe they're up to the job and maybe they aren't - but is that really any different than some old guy thinking he has what it takes to be a "senior" developer when he really doesn't?

Re:The real issue: "seniority" based pay

[Anonymous Coward]

I will always remember the smack down that a young programmer in our office received at the hands of a senior programmer. The young programmer was talking to the rest of us about how certain network environments work, making a rather loud argument about one particular aspect. The senior programmer, who was well respected by the rest of us, overheard the conversation and offered a quiet opinion... "that's not how it works". The young programmer spoke up quickly, saying he had managed a network of this type for 2 years and that he knew it worked this way. At this point the senior programmer grins and says... "Well, that's not how I wrote the specification". He then gave a 20 minute lecture on how it actually works.

People, not "students"

[TheMeuge]

So today I see an article about the growing narcissism of students

Might as well replace "students" with "people". The whole concept that this is somehow limited to graduates of whatever reeks of the "dirty intellectuals" cultural revolution mentality.

It's not graduates that are getting narcissistic, it's much of our society that's changing this way, of which they are but a subset. If you think that the people who don't finish high school and suckle on the NYC welfare tit for much of their life are any less narcissistic, you've got a dose of reality coming...

Our society has removed a system of intrinsic rewards that involve satisfaction from doing one's job well, and providing for one's family, and replaced it with a money-grabbing race for being buried with the most stuff. But make no mistake about it - this phenomenon has far less to do with education, and far more to do with the destruction of family as a concept.

Re:People, not "students"

[MoonBuggy]

Our society has removed a system of intrinsic rewards that involve satisfaction from doing one's job well, and providing for one's family, and replaced it with a money-grabbing race for being buried with the most stuff. But make no mistake about it - this phenomenon has far less to do with education, and far more to do with the destruction of family as a concept.

You can use money for much more interesting things than 'stuff'. I guess you could still quite accurately describe me as a narcissist, and perhaps the rest of my post is just serving to prove your point, but I dislike the superior attitude that so many people show when it comes to talking about wealth, as if we should be 'higher' people with loftier goals than that distasteful pursuit of money, the assumption being that those who want it are after money simply for the sake of a bank balance with a big number.

To put it bluntly, I would like to be rich. If I succeed in this it will mean I can travel to interesting places, learn new skills, and generally do things that I enjoy. All of this requires money for a multitude of reasons - the ability to take time off work, the acquisition of relevant information/permits/whatever, the equipment needed, and so on. I consider the goals of visiting every country on earth, or learning aerobatic flight, or skydiving, or juggling, or whatever else, to be perfectly valid and interesting things to wish for in my life. Perhaps you disagree? I don't know, although I would be surprised if you do. Sure, a shiny house filled with shiny things would be somewhat fun, but certainly not worth devoting myself to - that's the impression most people seem to push when they talk about money.

Yes, they're also entirely self-centred goals, but if you were to offer most people the choice of that life or of a 9 to 5 at a stable and moderately well-paid job I think I know which they would choose. I'm also well aware of the fact that most of those with serious wealth in the world got there working about as hard as those in the 9 to 5s, maybe a bit more so, maybe a bit less so. What good reason is there to devote myself to trying to have a 'normal' life when there's some chance I can have a life much more interesting than that?

Every Generation

[perlhacker14]

Every new generation is bound to feel superior to the previous, being fresh and inexperienced and self-confident in their sparkling new standards. Every previous generation will feel that the new children are annoying little pests wearing too-big boots. This is to be expected, and the attitudes usually fade over time as the new generation gets hit with reality and the older ones come to stand them.
Of course, this really is the one of the first times that it comes up in the software fields, as the field is relatively new.

blame modern child rearing

[thule]

... and schools. Parents don't teach their kids that some things are just simply part of life. You have to do it whether you like it or not. You have to do it even if you don't get an allowance or a gold star. Some things are worth doing even if you don't feel good about doing it.

Schools affirm this by removing competition and focus on making sure kids feel good about themselves. This is reflected in a recent survey where US kids scored lower on things like math, but felt that had done well on the test. Non-US students felt that they had not done well on the test, but scored higher. In other words, stupid US kids feel really good about themselves. Heck, they've been rewarded not for getting things right, but for trying! Why wouldn't they expect to get constant affirmation in the professional world?

Bring back competition. Bring back winning and loosing. Bring back hard work. Dump the ego-centric psychology.

Re:Precious Snowflakes

[Swizec]

What about those of us who were never told by our parents we were good at anything, rather below average than precious snowflakes. Where do we get our sense of exelence and whatever else makes us think we should be paid huge amounts of moneys?

Oh that's right, it's that wherever you look in this day and age 90% of the populace are clueless idiots who rarely, if ever, look at anythign outside shcool curriculum. Hell, I've seen worse job applications from college graduates than I used to send out when I was in my senior high school year. Actual knowledge is also on about the same level.

Obligatory

[Blakey Rat]

"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint"
- Hesiod, 8th century BC

I've seen a little of that

[HangingChad]

...are you seeing the sorts of 'crashing down to Earth' expectations of college grads described here?

I see a little of that 20-something narcissism here and there, but it's not universal. What I see more of is what I would call intellectual stubbornness. Every so often I'll interview someone I think has potential and, even if they don't get hired for that job, I'll keep them on a short list for future openings. Along with that give them some suggestions for areas of focus that would give them an edge on the next interview. Do this, this and this and the next time we have an opening I don't have to advertise it, just hire out of the pool. Saves me sorting through the resume slush pile.

At first I was subtle about the suggestions, but very few would pick up on them. Even when I would contact them quarterly to see how they were doing, trying to show them they really were on the short list. I finally had to quit being subtle and just give them the right answers. But even when I did that, it's amazing how few would give me that answer back. One I suggested they get familiar with a non-MSFT development framework. Any one. Zend, Cake, Rails...anything. They didn't have to develop an app, just learn about one. An hour of reading. And the next time we talked they were in another .NET class. Then acted surprised when they didn't get that job, either. ????

That I do see that a lot in young people. They're convinced they have the right answers and won't budge or take a suggestion. There's no curiosity or willingness to explore. they seem really regimented in their thinking. Something I found profoundly saddening personally and, as hiring authority, really freaking annoying.

Nothing new

[S-4'N3]

The arrogance of educated workers isn't anything particularly new however it is something that seems to drift from field to field along with educational trends. A couple of years ago I read an article on how something like over 60% of CEO's would not hire anyone with an MBA on account of how disastrous former employees had been. At the time, and as a generality (no I'm not talking about you, Mr. MBA who happens to read slashdot) MBA graduates tended to assume that because of their diploma, they knew how to run a department or company better than people without the equivalence in education, but many years of experience. Now this trend is starting to apply to programmers. They expect that with their degrees and certifications, they will be better workers, and thus given better opportunities than people many years their senior. Now I'm not saying we are all supposed to LIKE Bill Gates, or anything, but his high school diploma has certainly gotten him far. No amount of education will ever replace work experience. Learning new or even old out-dated languages is part of any intense IT job, and only with experience will you be good at troubleshooting and reverse engineering the kind of poorly documented stuff that you will be expected to do. Personally, I have the same level of education as Bill Gates and have dropped out of college twice, but that hasn't prevented glamourous opportunities from coming my way. On account of my skill, experience, and knowledge of my companies products, I've been flown to Edmonton (okay... it's really not THAT glamourous), while some of my colleagues have been to Vancouver several times. Now I'm not saying higher education won't get me farther in life, but not having higher education has certainly not prevented hard work and experience from contributing to an interesting career. Any college graduate should know that your education will get you nowhere without hard work and level headedness, and that an inflated ego will only hold you back. I don't think it's necessarily fair to entirely blame the baby-boomers for this scourge of arrogant graduates, but as a trend, I certainly suspect they didn't help. The boomers did grow up in a time where education guaranteed a more exciting career and life. Then 'everybody' went to school and we wound up with Generation X. You'd somehow hope that this younger generation (of which I am pretty much a part) would have caught on. Let's just blame videogames and short-attention span TV instead.

Re:Precious Snowflakes

[FishWithAHammer]

This is so many kinds of true.

I'm a college CS junior. I am in the top 5% in my class in ability (grades are another matter, busywork annoys me). Whenever there's a group project, people are beelining to work with me, because I have demonstrated programming skills, project management ability, and the ability to break down problems to be easily understood by others.

I don't mean to brag when I say this, but rather explore a perspective. I heard this a lot: "man, I wish I could work like you do."

And I ask--why the fuck can't they?

I'm nothing special, I've just been using computers and programming for a long time. I learned BASIC when I was 7. Not to just print "HELLO WORLD" on the screen, but to do stuff. I figured out Hello World and how to generate random numbers - let's make a slot machine program! That works? What about graphics, turning it from ASCII to some 16-color awesomeness? That works? What about adding sound? And I was doing it on my own. I didn't have any teachers. My dad's a network engineer, but he doesn't know how to program--I was writing small processing apps for him in Java and Visual Basic when I was 11. Identify the problem, find a solution, implement the solution. And since I have that body of experience, today in college I can get away with paying only half a mind to my studies. I've been doing it so long that it's innate. I don't have to think about it, I just do it, and the process of adding more tools to my toolbox via academic study just happens naturally. (These days I spend my spare time learning new things that aren't necessarily programming-related. I picked up a MIDI keyboard and a bass guitar four months ago and started making electronic music. I can afford to branch out because I know my core stuff so thoroughly.)

But what about the other students I mentioned? Most aren't programming in their spare time. Most came to school having had one or two high school programming classes and thought that was enough. They weren't learning outside of class. They still don't. Do the bare minimum of the homework, forget how all of it worked as soon as you finish the exam on the material. (A guy today asked me how to do string matching in Java. He's a senior graduating this semester. He's had four classes where Java was the assigned language.)

And it shows. No drive, no attention to detail. Some of them get internships as a company's PHP monkey or whatever, and they brag about it.

Me? I do their jobs in 2-3 weeks as a consultant and leave the client with something they don't need a webmaster for. I've done Google Summer of Code twice, with two very different groups, and am looking at doing it again--not really for the money, but just to broaden my horizons, to get into new fields of development and to learn more about my craft. I'm starting my own software-service company in May, with an estimated customer base of 60-80 clients already (thanks to networking, getting out and meeting people, not being a goddamn mushroom in a basement) and an estimated first-month after-tax profit of $8,800--which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize it's being run out of my apartment, on a sliding margin, without a dime of my own money invested in the enterprise, while living in a state where the median income is $25,000 per capita.

My generation is afflicted entitlement mentalities and an aversion to actually doing anything to better themselves. It's sad.

Re:Blame the parents teachers

[JustShootMe]

Maybe I'm just cynical, but does it really matter? If they want to sit there on their asses and bitch and moan about how bad their lives are, that's their problem - and it makes it just that much easier for people like you and I to make something of ourselves.

I'm not saying I wish it on them, really... but I'm not responsible for them, I'm responsible for me. You see what I'm saying? You can lead a horse to water...

It only becomes my problem when they expect me to support them...

Re:Yes

[MoonBuggy]

Almost everybody I knew in college didn't know the value of hard work

Look at the world around you and show me where 'hard work' is getting the best results for the worker.

The best ways to a life of comfort and excitement are luck, corruption, parental privilege, or a combination of all three. Good ideas might also get you somewhere, but only with a dose of luck attached. Sometimes, but certainly not always, these might need to be coupled with a workload that's maybe equivalent to that of a nurse or a teacher. Notice how said nurse and teacher are putting in equally hard work for a relative pittance?

The way monetary value is measured has become almost completely abstract, so it's unsurprising that those growing up in this system have different ideas to the older generation.

Re:Precious Snowflakes

[BrainInAJar]

I get sent internationally once a year or so.

The trick is to work for a company that's gigantic, and has a workforce all over the place. Then get yourself inserted in to the most international team you can find there. Some team that works on a disproportionately foreign open-source project for instance ( like KDE, or for that matter just Linux ). Then you need to do a bit of extra work to warrant your being sent places ( write papers for conferences, etc )

Technical marketing is another mostly-technical field that involves a lot of international travel ( though you'll find you spend an inordinate amount of time in SFBay ) since you need to keep your ear on the buzz of the industry and make sure your company has a showing at various trade shows.

If international travel is high on your list of job satisfaction goals, you can achieve it. You may need to do extra work or take a bit of a salary cut to get it, but you can do it.

Re:What the hell?

[vlm]

Or are the other people I'm being judged against too fucking retarded to teach themselves?

They're too busy watching American Idol. Look on the bright side, it makes folks like us, stacks of money, at least in comparison to them. Besides, we know its more fun than what they do.

Re:Actually...

[commodore64_love]

That's interesting. When I graduated college (97) I had the exact opposite opinion. In fact I said to my 7-year-long JCPenney boss, "I'm worried about my new job at Lockheed." "Why?" "I don't think I'm good enough." He told me if I fail, I'm always welcome to come back. And then laughed. ;-)

As it turned-out I was ready for the Lockheed job, but I certainly didn't feel I was "the shit" going into the working world. My first project was designing a CCA with a budget of only $10,000 (plus labor costs), and I was definitely not in charge. That responsibility fell to a guy 60-something years old who monitored my every move.

I don't understand today's grads who think they will just automatically be given million-dollar projects and travel expense budgets.

Re:Moving beyond "work"

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I like working.

I hate the obligation to work though.

Re:Millennials watched more TV

[fm6]

Nobody watched much TV before 1950 or so. The NTSC format used by U.S. broadcasters wasn't standardized until 1941, and then the war ended production of TV sets, so there were about 5,000 sets in the whole country. Add a few years for the price of the technology to drop (and for Great Depression era nervousness about buying stuff to wear off) and you really don't have any TV viewers to speak of until the mid 50s.

I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and I recall TV addiction being an issue for me and my friends even then. But I don't think it got to be really bad until the 80s, when cable became widely available, latchkey kids became the norm, and TV was the easiest way for most kids to distract themselves.

Another factor: more and more people living in "edge cities" as mass transit withered and car ownership became common. That really limits the social life of children too young to drive, especially once parents started getting nervous about letting their kids do stuff without supervision.

Re:Precious Snowflakes

[FishWithAHammer]

Excellent post, and I agree 100%. Most really good programmers I know don't really spend a lot of time interacting with people, either on projects or off. It's not my own strong suit, by nature. But I learned pretty early on that it was what you had to do, so I made up my mind to consciously attempt to improve that skill. You may not follow what they say, but you should always listen to it.

The willingness to talk and discuss a problem is something that's been cited as something that one of my clients (a repeat customer) likes. I don't try to tell them what they need and how to go about it, I let them elaborate on what they need, asking the questions that will lead me to a firm grasp of the problem, and then I tailor a solution to the problem rather than having a solution already in mind from the start.

Re:Precious Snowflakes

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to pay your dues like everyone else.

You don't understand Narcissistic people at all

1. They don't have any self-esteem at all, they are self-loathing, they always present an artificial grandiose public face to garner external-esteem.
2. They will only want to work on the flashiest projects to reinforce their grandiose image
3. Any contribution they make will be worth ten times any equivalent contribution by someone else.
4. They are habitual liars and exaggerators, the only person they will lie to more than you is themselves.
5. If you buy into their grandiose public image, they know you believed the lie and you have earned their disdain for being gullible.
6. Narcissism is very probably incurable, but it can be managed through reward and punishment, the only effective reward is praise and attention, the only effective punishment is unemotional in-attention; the cost will probably be not worth the effort.
7. Narcissitic people don't care what you think about them as long as you allways think about them.

Only common people pay their dues, treating a Narcissist as common would be seen as a personal attack by them.

As a clinically diagnosed narcissist, I find this list to be pretty inaccurate.

1. Wrong. Narcissists do have high self esteem but it is built on an extremely fragile foundation of other people's opinions.

2. I certainly don't do this. In fact I tend to lean toward projects that are less flash because I feel like I can "knock them out of the park" with ease and thereby garner greater praise. It has to be just hard enough not to be easy, but not so hard that I'd actually have to try.

3. This is mostly true, but maybe the factor of ten is a little high ;)

4. True except that this implies that outright falsehoods are the norm. I tend to speak in half-truths to try an manipulate people's opinions rather than simply lie to them. I'm finding that not nearly as good at this as I believe I am.

5. No this isn't true. You have to remember that the narcissist believes the lie too. He relishes any support for his warped view of the world but that view happens to include being better than you and everyone else.

6. I'll have to report back on this as I'm in the process of working on it.

7. NO NO NO NO NO! Narcissistic people believe THAT you are always thinking about them and as such, they put every ounce of effort they have into making you think well of them.

See, I know more about this than you do.

Re:Precious Snowflakes

[JoeMerchant]

you end up spending so much time actually working that I got very little time to actually go look at the historic European city I was sent to.

If at all possible, schedule a week, or even just a few days, of personal time off during your travel. If you're lucky, you can schedule your trip to include a weekend, but if you're getting sent to Europe for the first time in 15 years, I'd really look into the possibility of scheduling several days off to enjoy the place before packing up to come home.

Re:Lowered Expectations

[syousef]

Our school systems tell our kids that they all have the potential for greatness. Not just being good at something, but great at something......We don't all shine on. Very few of us do. Unfortunately, too many teachers preach Lennon's line at students. You don't want to discourage students from trying to reach higher, but you also want them to be realistic about the world.

You misunderstand. Shining is not about being great in other people's eyes or achieving fame and fortune. It's about being happy with the things you have and doing what you do as well as you can.

What people don't understand is life under the spotlight is a pain in the neck. Very few of us would actually want to be there. You can still achieve great things in your own life. They just don't have significance to others, and THAT is alright.

Teaching kids they're all mundane will make even the great ones mundane, and will leave them all depressed. Self esteem needs to be based on reality. Actually assess them on the work they do and give them praise for what they actually do achieve when it is clear they are trying their best or clsoe to it, but don't make them feel bad for not achieving higher. In other words, tell little johnny that 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong and grade him accordingly, but don't make him feel bad for not doing even better when he does get the answer right. Part of building self esteem is learning to deal with criticism and understanding the difference between getting it right and screwing up, and learning to cope with both. The school system doesn't recognise that and sees any time the child feels bad as some sort of damage. I feel sorry for kids who make it out into the workforce and suddenly have to cope with learning that their boss doesn't pat them on the back when they bollox things up. It's not the new generation's fault. It's the educators that need a reality check.