I agree that it’s often important to make sure credit is allocated accurately.
I’ll note that on the other hand, for a substantial fraction of people I know, more than 10% of their impact came through them taking actions that they never get public credit for, because their projects required that their actions needed to be non-public for one reason or another.
There’s a big practical difference between getting 80% of the overall credit you deserve and getting none. And there’s also a big difference between the attitudes “I don’t care about credit, if it happens it happens” and “I will make sure I get my due credit, except in specific cases where there’s a good reason to forgo it and which I know about up-front[1]”.
As with most resources (money, status, etc.) it’s probably sensible to make sure you get “paid” fairly most of the time, then use your resource slack to do “unpaid” work where the reasons for being unpaid are particularly good.
Knowing up-front is important to not get got. Going into a job with the knowledge that your contribution is secret is very different from not putting up a fight about being credit rug-pulled at the end.
I agree that it’s often important to make sure credit is allocated accurately.
I’ll note that on the other hand, for a substantial fraction of people I know, more than 10% of their impact came through them taking actions that they never get public credit for, because their projects required that their actions needed to be non-public for one reason or another.
There’s a big practical difference between getting 80% of the overall credit you deserve and getting none. And there’s also a big difference between the attitudes “I don’t care about credit, if it happens it happens” and “I will make sure I get my due credit, except in specific cases where there’s a good reason to forgo it and which I know about up-front[1]”.
As with most resources (money, status, etc.) it’s probably sensible to make sure you get “paid” fairly most of the time, then use your resource slack to do “unpaid” work where the reasons for being unpaid are particularly good.
Knowing up-front is important to not get got. Going into a job with the knowledge that your contribution is secret is very different from not putting up a fight about being credit rug-pulled at the end.