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> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth.

I've experienced this too, & entered the profession in 2011 without completing post secondary

Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year. When you're just trying to scrape by you won't make take those odds. But if you're passionate you're not thinking about those odds, they're a byproduct of your passion

Prefer opportunism to goal setting

> if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year.

"actualllyyy" you've got a 2 in 3 chance of landing it each year.

1-((1-(0.3/100))^365) = 0.66

EDIT: stop upvoting me, he's right. The question isn't "what is the probability of at least one success in a year", but rather "how many trials, on average, does it take to get one success" - and the answer to THAT is in fact 333, from the geometric distribution.

“actualllllyyyyy” he’s saying something different. If you take a 0.3% chance for N days where N is large, you’ll land it 0.003N times, or once every ~333 days.

The chance of landing it within any particular window of K days is a different concept (which you showed how to reason about).

You're right! Edited my comment.

But you've also got a 20% chance of landing it twice and a 7% chance of landing it three times and a 2% chance of landing it four times and so, on average, you'll land it every 333 days.

> Essentially I believe it comes down to the fact that if you take a 0.3% chance every day, you'll land it once a year.

This is very true. Life is like poker, not chess. On that front everyone should read Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke.

> I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked, so there's some anecdotal personal truth.

This is an unfalsifiable assertion. It also implies that if you failed, you just didn't want it hard enough. That's not a message that people who are having trouble finding a job need to hear.

Yeah that's why I said 'I know it's wrong and irrational', haha. It helped me when I had trouble finding a job. Maybe different people need different messages. Like the OSCP motto, 'when the going gets tough, try harder'. For some people that would be demotivating, whereas for others it has the opposite effect.

Perhaps people have 'motivational styles' and the best approach is to learn what kind of message works best for one's personal styles.

In 2015, my first software job paid 95k and it wasn't a small firm. It was a large, publicly traded software company. It's possible salaries could plateau in this industry. You'll "make it" but you won't be making bank like the unprecented growth in stock valuations that occurred in the 2000s and 2010s. Silicon Valley won't be minting as many millionaires as it did in those decades.

I think the 2000's were a bust for most people. It was the proverbial lost decade. We had the dot-com crash, followed by 9/11, a short recovery, then the GFC a few short years later. It wasn't until 2013 or so that things got back to positive. If you adjust for inflation, it's even worse. Play around with https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

Dev Bootcamp popularized rails bootcamps, and they weren't even founded until 2012. The bootcamp "scene" definitely wasn't around in 2008.

Woops, you're right, I mixed up my eras.

Maybe they weren't called bootcamps, but these short webdev training courses have been around since the late 1990s.

The classes/courses prior to Dev Bootcamp et al. were vastly different and not comparable to current programs, and certainly did not have even close to the number of students/customers.

I went through a bootcamp too.

I'd look around the room and "Man at least half of these folks have no chance.".

It is very much a thing that for most people you need to be "INTERESTED" in how this works for it to work out as a career / push through frustration and have the tenacity to keep at it.

Just programming as a job with tasks like a garbage man or something where you go do the thing and never do it if you don't have to ... just is a rough way to learn.

What kinda dev work? Would definitely be interested.

If you'd like more details, the recruiter I'm thinking of is https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguelsuarezr/. They probably have stuff elsewhere as well. I just started a position in security (which I found here on HN on the last Who Wants To Be Hired thread!) so I didn't follow up but I know they are looking for Python people.

Good luck!

Siempre me asombra ver la diversidad de personas en HN. En que parte de Mexico estas? Saludos!

Saludos de Mérida, Yucatán!

“ I intuit that if you are insanely dedicated enough the universe has a weird appreciation for that kind of thing, and eventually throws you a bone. I know it's wrong and irrational but everytime I've tried that it's worked”

Also known as survivorship bias.

Not necessarily. A prerequisite for winning any game is showing up. Those who show up most often are therefore more likely to win.

Someone who practices a skill for 20 hours a week for a year will have had 1040 hours of practice vs 258 hours of practice for someone who practices 5 hours a week, and that linear increase in time will likely produce an exponential increase in skill as knowledge builds on itself. Assuming there's a market for the skill, the odds of success in that market will also go up exponentially. And if demand shrinks (ie economic recession) that filters out the 5-hours-a-week people.

Assuming we have defined "success" and the person A will multiply their chance of success by 2 after each try.

That leaves almost zero chances of success.

Success, however we choose to define it, is in large part a result of luck. Skill, to a much lesser degree.

Luck and skill aren't mutually exclusive. They work together.

Maybe with a uselessly broad definition of "luck", as in "lucky to be born at the right time for software to be a viable career" or "lucky to be alive, the dead can't earn any money at all".

But if you think that successful engineers are only successful because they just magically got hired one day, and if they never learned any science, math, or got an engineering degree and put in zero or near-zero effort they would have had the same odds of been hired, that's just not a logical argument. Same goes for other professions.

We all start with the hand we're dealt by the universe, but it is possible to improve one's odds quite substantially given time and good decisions (that's arguably the definition of a "good decision").

I think of it like `success = (luck * skill)`. Meaning that if you have all the skill in the world, but the absolute worst luck, you can still fail, and vice versa, but with that said, the majority of possibilities for luck can be countered by higher skill.

Is Ken Thompson lucky? Probably was very lucky to have influences to point him towards electrical engineering and computer science, but with his level of skill, it's hard to imagine him not having a huge impact somewhere. Ending up at Bell Labs (let's say that's luck since he could've worked in a variety of environments) is definitely lucky, but he wouldn't have created UNIX if he didn't also have the skill. I think this goes for the majority of figures in computer science (I don't know enough about other fields to say that about them).

I honestly don't know how people who attribute everything to luck even manage to exist in the world.

Do you just sit at home staring at the wall waiting for luck to happen to you? What is the point of doing anything if all results only come from blind luck?

You engage with luck. Improve your skills and cultivate luck.

Anecdotal : every job I've had came from relations, 1st to 3rd degree.

Just because there's possibly some survivorship bias in their viewpoint doesn't mean their statement is automatically false.

I like to call that the survivorship bias bias. Similar to the sunk cost fallacy fallacy

Ha, that's a good name for it. We can go so far in trying to compensate for biases and fallacies that we introduce whole new ones!

Or rather the old adege of:

“The luck favors the prepared”

or the ones that never give up

People just remember that there are no guarantees. Dedication and hard work help a lot but you may still fail.

It's so hard to know when to give up on something you're dedicated to when it has high pay off but a moderately low chance of success.

"The harder you work, the luckier you get."

Also knows as being valuable

Survivorship bias is a valid thing to bring up when the odds are low. When the odds are fairly high, it isn't very useful. "A tech job, somewhere" is not a high bar.