Comment by aleph_minus_one

> Self-promoters that don't know the information always look good on paper, but after a few minutes of talking to them you can tell that they don't quite match.

My experience differs here: these are not "good self-promoters", but impostors.

Good self-promoters typically have some above-average (though commonly not really exceptional) skills in their area, but their expertise is in the capability of smooth talking (including smalltalk), promoting their contributions, and talking at eye level with various stakeholders.

If you are really exceptional in your area, you will often (though not always) consider smalltalk to be waste of your time, and will often have difficulties talking at eye level with various stakeholders, because either they are not sufficiently knowledgable in your area of expertise to understand you, or the other way round (for the latter point: becoming really great in one area often means that you won't have the time to get sufficiently deep into a lot of other areas, even though for some of them you might become quite skilled if you had more time).