> it's about knowing someone else trusted this person to be able to deliver in a professional context which is very different from what is considered delivering in an academic context.

How is it different? When you work in motivated groups at uni you split the work and rely on each other to do your part at a high quality. That’s also true for real work. Often enough you depend on certain things that your team mate does like finishing some part of a codebase while you worked on the theoretical underpinnings of an exploit and drafted that code. And now you can place your code into her code and rowhammer via JS works now.

I just don’t see the difference. Oh, and my performance reviews are “we are really happy with your work”. I used to work as a SWE and now as a data analyst. It all feels like school to me.

> Also you have to keep in mind just how oversubscribed academic qualifications are now so you're more just placing yourself at the starting line and whats more important is what you did outside that institution.

I see that it’s oversubscribed.