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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>>> The author likely comes from a structured, religious background

>How on God's green Earth did you jump to that conclusion?

The author wrote: "From the ages of 19-21, I spent my time as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon church. I worked 12 hours a day for two years straight with only Christmas and Mother’s Day off. [...] For this job, I was paid a total of 0 dollars."

It seems reasonable to assume that non-religious people wouldn't do that for $0 pay.

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Ironic because Utah is becoming a tech hot spot driven in part by the large Mormon presence.

How so? Recursion doesn’t scream full of Mormons to me.

Just one example. The Mormon mission program is quite possibly the best sales training program in the world. If you can go door to door in a country that isn't your own, in a second language, selling religion then enterprise SaaS is really a breeze. (Note I am not Mormon)

Selling eternal salvation to the poor will always be easier than selling another support tool to a procurement person spending someone else's money and probably with one eye on a new job.

Not sure where you're getting the idea a procurement person is making any sort of buying decisions for enterprise products within a business.

It does to me.

Their support system and rigid structure is unparalleled for such a large scale in the US. Their funding church is very wealthy, and the discipline churns out people that are very effective in high growth industries, which is just a convenient side effect relevant right now.

There is/was a significant Mormon contingent in the Ruby community, all the way up to Matz.

I've worked with a lot of Mormons in tech. You may have too and not realized it. In my experience, they tend to not put an emphasis on it, it's a more private thing.

I meant the pharma company in SLC.

Ah, I didn't know it was a company name, I thought it was a slightly confusing comment about computer science.

That’s interesting, I remember taking a negotiations course at MIT, and the professor noted that when she was teaching Mormons, they had ridiculously high social and human capital compared to most of their urban peers, especially because of the travel to other countries in many cases.

> ridiculously high social and human capital compared to most of their urban peers

I don't understand what this means. Are you just talking about connections?

E.g. they all had passports, had studied a foreign language, raised by two parents (time per child ratio, etc..)

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