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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

It probably depends on how you got into the line of work.

I always say I am lucky and privileged because through random chance, I developed an interest in programming as a kid and it became my favorite hobby, long before I chose it as a career. I spent hour and hours at it because it was how I played, and I became good at it because it matched my way of thinking about the world and I spent all my free time doing it.

This was luck. I could easily have had gardening as my favorite hobby, or art, or playing music. I would have had a lot harder time turning those into a lucrative career, so in that sense I am lucky.

Now, many people came into the field in different ways, so not everyone in the industry is lucky in the same way, but that doesn’t chance the fact that I am personally lucky.

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There is nothing privileged about being passionate in things that may earn you good money.

Luck? Sure

Privilege? Definitely not

What is the difference between luck and privilege?

I'm hoping your question isn't serious but just in case you don't know the difference between the two:

Luck - success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.

Privilege - a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

Hope this is helpful

Privilege: being lucky enough to be born/raised in the right circumstances

Still two different things.

I come from a poor family. Nothing was handed to me on a silver platter. My career is a function of passion, hard work and luck. Not privilege.

It makes my blod boil whenever I hear this privilege nonsense.

The problem with this conversation is that people feel attacked by the term, like it undermines the hard work they've done or their intelligence. It doesn't necessarily mean everything was handed to you on a silver platter. It's ok to acknowledge the ways in which you were dealt a good hand (if, in fact, you were).

Yes, saying that people like me achieved success due to privilege is misleading and hateful because it dismisses our hard work and tons of sacrifice to get where we are now.

But sure, call it a privilege. Thanks to discourse like this the word already lost its meaning.

The only thing that I got dealt a good hand is that by accident my passion and hobby can bring me a tonne of money.

Where is my privilege here? Sadly as many people here you're confusing luck and privilege. No point in carrying on with the exchange if you're insisting on calling everything privilege.

Thanks for the discussion.

I'm a self-taught programmer and I can think of several ways that my hard work was enabled by my privilege. And that's the key for me, is that you're focusing on the "here's what you were given" aspect of privilege and not the "here's what you were denied" aspect. Cheap computers abound now, but it wasn't long ago that having a personal computer at all implied a minimum income level.

I can't speak for you, but I went to a school with a computer lab and had a computer at home from a young age. Learning programming was hard, but it would have been a lot harder without those things. That's privilege. I was an advanced reader because my parents had time to teach me and filled our house with books. That's privilege. I had hobbies in my teen years instead of having to work to help support my family (privilege).

There are lots of people who could be brilliant programmers or engineers had they had the same opportunities as me. Instead of resenting the term, I acknowledge and am grateful for whatever advantages I was provided, because without them getting to the same place would have required exponentially more work, or maybe even been impossible.

Why does it bother you so much when people say you have privilege? Your privilege is that your passion and hobby is in high demand... most people don't have that. They have hobbies like fishing or golf or gardening, and those things aren't in high demand. If you had been born 200 years ago, your passion might also have been something that wasn't in high demand.

I don't see how that concept upsets you. No one is saying you did anything wrong, or that you haven't worked hard. We are just asking you need to accept that some of your success is due to luck, and your luck is a privilege.

Why is this important? Well, it is important to have an appreciation that not everyone had the same luck, and other people not doing as well in their careers is not necessarily because they haven't worked as hard as you.

Once you accept that, the next logical step is to realize that those of us who have been lucky (like me and you, who were lucky enough to have our skills be in high demand) should think about ways we can help those who haven't been so lucky.

A healthy society takes some from the lucky ones to help the unlucky ones. This doesn't mean that everyone should get the same reward, or that you don't deserve success or praise for your skills, just that there is some humbleness in not thinking you are better than someone else who is not as successful.

The fact that you get so angry when anyone points out that some of your success is based on chance and was not just because you worked harder is troubling. Why are you so defensive? Is it because you want to be able to think all of your success is based on your own hard work and therefore you don't need to share any of your success with the less fortunate?

I don't think you read my comments. If anything it looks like you just skimmed through them.

I explicitly said my success is a function of passion, hard work and LUCK. I have no problem admitting that part of my success is luck.

However equalling luck with privilege makes absolutely no sense. In your dictionary if I play poker and get a lucky hand I am now privileged.

What an utter nonsense.

And for the record I have absolutely zero problem with paying high taxes. Again, if you read my comments you'd know I come from a poor family. Government support was sometimes all we had. I fully support offering safety net for the less fortunate but can see you already made unfair assumptions about me.

If you get a lucky hand in poker, then yes, I would say you were privileged... for that specific hand.

Of course it doesn't matter much if you have privilege for one hand, and that privilege will change relatively fairly between everyone during a session of poker.

This is different though. This is more like playing a game of poker where a single hand lasts your whole life, and you keep reaping the benefits of your lucky draw for your entire life. That is meaningful privilege.

Imagine if instead of getting lucky with having an aptitude for computers, you instead inherited a million dollars when you turned 18.

Would you consider that privilege? It is just luck in the same way as your skills... you just happened to be born into a rich family who gave you money. That is luck, in the same way.

I think that is clearly privilege, and your computer skills are likely to earn you more than a million dollars extra in salary than someone working equally hard in a less lucrative profession.

If you think that inheriting a million dollars isn't privilege, I am curious as to what you think is.

Inheriting million dollars is luck not privilege. This discussion doesn't make any sense whatsoever as you decided to cling to a made-up instead of vocabulary definition of privilege [0].

The same is happening to other words these days. For example some people modified the term racism so that according to their definition you can't possibly be racist towards white people. Which is obviously idiotic, but at least it allows these people to push their sick racist agendas.

Like I said, there is nothing to be achieved here when you're using your own definitions of words.

[0] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaur...

Ok, look at number 2 definition:

"the power and advantages that come with great wealth or high social class"

Well, your luck gets you a lot of wealth, which is having privilege

> Inheriting million dollars is luck not privilege.

I'll take the bait. I can't tell if you're confusing things on purpose but here goes.

If you are Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions, sure, it's just luck. Most people do not mysteriously inherit money, but get it from older relatives they are close with. If your parents die with a million bucks to leave to you, your life was already very different than someone whose parents die nothing, or worse a mountain of debt. People who can't afford to send their kids to college, for example, probably don't have a mil to leave them. I am not sure I've ever heard of someone just randomly lucking into that kind of inheritance. It probably happens sometimes.

But getting that million dollars suddenly enables you to live a very different life, and you get to take advantage of things that people who live paycheck to paycheck cannot. You cannot say that does not fit the definition you linked.

> In your dictionary if I play poker and get a lucky hand I am now privileged.

Reductio ad absurdum. A poker hand is dealt randomly, as are circumstances of birth and other factors, sure. But the next poker hand we are all on equal footing.

However the analogy is a good one if you extend it. If you win a big poker hand early in the game, gameplay changes once you're the chip lead. Your definition of what a good hand is changes. You are able to take chances and play hands that someone else couldn't. Once you have a stack of chips, you can win hands with those chips regardless of what cards are dealt. Sure, it's not a guarantee and you still have to play the rest of the game well.

Utter nonsense. If you put enough mental grease into that sort of interpretation everything can be classed as a privilege, in which case the concept is irrelevant.

Yes, any bit of luck you have that makes your life better is a privilege, because it is something that makes your life better than someone who didn't have that luck. They didn't do anything wrong to deserve not having the luck, it was just chance.

This doesn't make the concept irrelevant. It is important to accept and understand that a lot of your success in life is due to things outside of your control. You don't have to apologize for it, but you also shouldn't think you are better than people who weren't lucky.

Understanding this is important, because if you think that your success is entirely based on choices you made, you might feel like people who aren't successful are that way entirely based on their choices, too. Realizing that luck plays a big role is the first step towards understanding that those of us who have been lucky should help those of us who haven't been as lucky, because they don't deserve to be miserable just because they had bad luck.

> It is important to accept and understand that a lot of your success in life is due to things outside of your control.

That's a generalization and takes away from people's agency. for luck to play a part in your life, you need to show up and work.

Sure, but lots of people show up and work hard but only make minimum wage. The privilege is that your hard work earns a lot more money than someone else's hard work.

I love this twisted thinking.

When my peers were partying and having a great time I was spending nights at the computer learning stuff.

I made this sacrifice willingly. Years later I'm reaping the benefits of that sacrifice which I think I earned and is fair but still some people who don't like others to be successfull will call me privileged like it was all magically bestowed upon me.

We all had the same start. I choose a different path that cost me a lot.

And you have the nerve to call me privileged. Wow.

Well, “interest in programming” sounds to be like a special advantage in the current world; why do you think it’s not a privilege? It might even be genetic!

(Not to mention that you also need the privilege of being born relatively smart.)

Well if you frame it like that everything and anything can be called privilege.

Doesn't make much sense to me.

I think of “privilege” as something that persists (e.g. IQ) vs “luck” as something that happens once (e.g. winning the lottery).

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