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Comment by void_mint | Hacker News Reader

Luck (and/or nepotism) ultimately decides the success or failure of two equally hard working individuals or groups. In your Olympic medalist example, do you believe that the person that placed 4th and thus did not medal didn't work as hard as the Gold/Silver/Bronze? Or did they just not have the "luck" of having the genetics/life scenarios that are most conducive to winning their respective competition?

Ultimately I think "work hard" is generally good advice to be "good enough" or "above average", but actual success in the scale that you're describing definitely comes down to luck, because everyone in contention is working extremely hard.

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> Or did they just not have the "luck" of having the genetics/life scenarios that are most conducive to winning their respective competition?

Most likely they did minimal errors or had slightly unfortunate conditions; when it comes down to fractions of a second, minimal performance differences most likely don't matter to much.

But all of these people still were at the Olympics. And you bet everyone making it there worked their ass off to get there. Going back to the Fortunes, this might be the equivalent of the "unlucky" exit at a few hundred million, instead of making it to the billions. Which is actually a nice parallel: You might need a bit of luck, but you also need the work.

> Most likely they did minimal errors or had slightly unfortunate conditions;

Not all of "luck" is in the moment, is my point. Some of the luck is where you're born, who your family is, what seemingly inconsequential decisions you make.

The article isn't comparing different people at the top, it's comparing the top and not-top. In my Olympics example what is salient is the median person who made it to the Olympics vs the median person. Reframing it is veering from the point of the article and my comment.

Not sure what your point is?

> no one became an oil tycoon by or started an ISP or laid underseas cables by tripping into it.

Lots of people worked extremely hard and were competing with said-Tycoon, but didn't become an Oil Tycoon. This is luck.

If genetics is luck, then what is left for "self"? Willpower/grit/etc. is also environment or genetics, there's no self outside of that.

Genetics are unchangable (kind of, mostly)

Environment is not

What specifically is your question?

The GP calls genetics "luck" in the context of dichotomy between being self made and luck... if genetics is luck, then what is left for "self"? Ability to work hard is also the product of genetics, upbringing and circumstances, so at that point the distinction becomes meaningless.

This is a classic conflation; comparing real life success (where you would hopefully not choose to place yourself into a highly competitive business environment, unless you had a unique ability to win) versus a contrived scenario like the Olympics, where success is literally pitting two highly talented people in a competition where both cannot win.

In business, you can open a restaurant and be just as successful (or as unsuccessful) as your counterpart on a different street, or even right next door. There is no first and second place medalist in that scenario.

Life is not a competition unless you choose to make it one. There can be only one President at a time; only one gold medalist at a time in any event, but there can be many Elon Musks or Kanye Wests. Ultra-performing people work hard to get to the top, and then the same habits that put them there expand their "lead", but Elon Musk isn't in direct competition with anyone else at being the best Elon Musk he can be.

I'm not so sure about this.

Wanting to work at FAANG is basically the olympics of IT, and people still try to do it all the time.

This seems way off. The number of engineers working at FAANG is in the hundreds of thousands, an athlete that is 100000th best in the world is basically a hobbyist rando.

It's all relative. There are more professional software engineers than professional weight lifters. The top 1% work at FAANG, the top 1% go to the olympics.

The whole Olympic roster for the US is ~500 people. There's half a million people who are current NCAA athletes, that's an order of magnitude off right there, even after excluding football and before counting in the actual pros.

This example kind of falls apart with respect to the Olympics for an array of reasons. If you're looking at NCAA athletes, lots of those sports are not represented in the Olympics. Also, because spots in the Olympics are limited, the "best" person isn't always chosen to represent a given country for a given sport.

>If you're looking at NCAA athletes, lots of those sports are not represented in the Olympics.

Not really, just football and lacrosse. On the other hand, there're many Olympic events that are not a part of the NCAA.

>Also, because spots in the Olympics are limited, the "best" person isn't always chosen to represent a given country for a given sport.

I don't think this is particularly important on average. I'm just giving a quick and dirty lower bound here to put things into perspective.

> I don't think this is particularly important on average. I'm just giving a quick and dirty lower bound here to put things into perspective.

...how? "This person did nothing wrong and still did not make it to the olympics". That's literally what we're debating?

This thread is clearly about comparing the probabilities of getting into FAANG vs getting into the Olympics. The situation with varying relative competitiveness of the local "scene" in a particular country is the same in both cases, despite the fact that even the 1% figure for FAANG engineers would only work under the assumption of the global pool of candidates (~20 mil software engineers worldwide), all willing to relocate and prioritizing FAANG above all other employers (a lot of assumptions). Tldr: no, being kinda good at leetcode is not an Olympic-level feat, try the ICPC.

You're kinda just...debating with yourself. Your TLDR isn't anything even remotely close to anything I ever said or suggested. Equating everyone in the NCAA to every professional software engineer is super silly; it'd be a better comparison to say the entire NCAA and everyone that took a coding class sometime in their education.

If you scroll up you'll find this discussion is about luck vs. hard work. I'll be stepping out of this specific comment thread now though. Enjoy your night.

> This is a classic conflation; comparing real life success (where you would hopefully not choose to place yourself into a highly competitive business environment, unless you had a unique ability to win)

Two people that are extremely talented interviewed for a position in which there is only 1 opening. One is selected, one isn't. Is this not a competition? Did the person that wasn't selected work less hard?

Working hard puts you in contention for lots of extremely competitive things in life. Often times, luck is the thing that decides which of the extremely talented, hard working individuals succeed and at what scale.

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