I've never been competitive and no exam has ever driven me to tears.
Everything I've learned was self thought and I took it at my own pace which is way slower than academia requires but that gave me the opportunity to delve deeper and answer my own questions.
I don't care about competing with my peers I just want to see cool things and have fun building cool things with other people.
That's probably why stress never gets to me and I never push my self into psychological hell hole.
I've done it once when I was a student and I never want to go back to that and I'm certainly not going to accept an employer pushing me to that.
I would rather quit.
Do you know more than I do about something? There are lots of things that you (the general you, meaning anyone) know more about than me. All I want is to learn from you, and teach you some things that I know (which reinforces my own learning). That's it.
One of the reasons I left my last job was because it was very much a competitive, back-stabbing sort of environment. You could only get "better" in that environment by actively making someone else worse. How that makes sense when your goal is to produce a research product, I'll never know.
I guess what I'm saying with all of this is, I'm happy to see other people admit to the overall viewpoint that you've shared here.
The nice thing about being in computing is that there is just so much work to do that you can have a lot of people working without ever competing directly for the "top job".
I wonder if this is self-reinforcing. When you're used to huge amounts of stress from school, it seems natural that companies will try to take advantage of that and simply start expecting more. Or when graduates from such schools get into positions of management, they might not even see that what they're asking of people is not healthy, because it's become perfectly normal for them. But it's a zero-sum game. How long before it spirals out of control, if it hasn't already?