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Comment by dimgl | Hacker News Reader

> only through sheer dumb luck of loving computers

It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind. It almost sounds like you're ashamed of how easy it was for you to escape your circumstances. Remember that the good times don't actually last forever, and you might reach a ceiling in your career that other people in other professions don't have to deal with.

Also, being a software engineer isn't the only profession that pays well. It just so happens that due to modernity, it's extremely accessible.

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As someone who has been incredibly lucky _and_ has worked very hard to surpass a rough start, I think it simply helps to have a thorough understanding of what it means to be lucky.

You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice. Luck would literally have to come and hunt you down at random. If you're pretty good at [whatever] but at the right places (including virtually) and meeting the right people, luck will work far better for you.

In both cases, luck is important. You can be among the best and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do well in every competition, and be first to launch with every idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly, repeatedly. Which is why we like to say it's important to get used to losing. Because even if you're very good and always in the right places at the right times with the right people - you _still_ need luck.

You just need less luck than someone who isn't showing up every day. And a lot less luck than someone literally doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. But you still need luck.

Everything is luck. You ability to learn, acquire and utilize knowledge, physical ability, not getting struck by lightning, being able to play basketball at the level of Lebron James, etc. None if it was earned - some dice were rolled when you were born and that's it.

> You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice.

That is entirely based on luck. Were you born with the correct genetics and environment to get you off your couch or not?

> You can be among the best and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do well in every competition, and be first to launch with every idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly, repeatedly

There's no difference between getting struck by lightning or being born with the right genetics that give you determination, intelligence, work ethic, etc. All luck.

I don't get this fixation with acknowledging how lucky one is when all of it is luck. We should be concerned with optimizing society so that we get to a point where no human has to struggle any more.

Yeah, it's luck. It's perfectly healthy to frame things as: I took a deep interest in computers for which expertise is now in high demand.

I'm in the same boat: loved computers early on and had no interest in pursuing them professionally (I was eight when I started programming). It's lucky because I could just as well have loved botany, or auto mechanics, or pottery, etc but I happened to pick the one that later in life was in high demand.

Sure, yeah, I worked hard, but not because "I want to make MONEY when I get older!" but simply because I had the interest (and supportive parents...luck again). The alignment of my early interests and market conditions today are 100% luck. And that's what you need: to be in the right place at the right time. I'd attribute my success to 10% personal factors and 90% external factors.

You still need to work your ass off for that 10%, but the other 90% is all out of your hands, and it's ok to acknowledge this (and that doesn't mean you feel guilty). In fact, if we ever want to create a world where the ratio is not 90/10, but 80/20 or 60/40 or dare I say 50/50, we need to acknowledge just how much of our lives is out of our control.

No reason to be ashamed of luck. I feel tremendously lucky that I have enough brain power to be a decent programmer and engineer. This has helped me to recover from bouts of massive depression. There were years where I basically dropped out life but once things got better I was able to find well paying jobs pretty easily. I feel I am very lucky to have that fallback that a lot of other people don’t have. I was not so lucky that somehow I never seem to be able to improve my social skills much.

I think a lot of life is luck and it’s ok to admit that. I hate it when people who got lucky reject that idea and try to make you believe that it’s all hard work and if other people only worked hard they could achieve the same. I know enough people who simply don’t have the talent to do what I can do and there are plenty of things I can’t do no matter how hard I work.

I am also lucky that I have decent looks so it’s not too hard to find a partner despite my often painful shyness and awkwardness. Other people aren’t that lucky.

> It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind.

I don't think this is unhealthy. I liked computers, my sibling liked painting... only one of us got a high-paying job and can afford a lot of leisure time and travel. I don't think that it requires shame to acknowledge that luck had something to do with it. Luck is ever-present in our lives.

Software engineering has an incredibly low barrier to entry for a technical profession and has no formal checks. There’s plenty of smart people who don’t grok it.

I guess just be grateful, don’t take your current circumstances for granted, and try and be kind to others if you can.

Genuinely asking, as someone who frames my own circumstances similarly, what would you say is a healthy way to frame things?

Fwiw I disagree with it being unhealthy and I view myself the same way. It IS lucky that my only hobby/interest I’ve ever really had also happens to be something that pays so well.

Nothing unhealthy about recognizing one’s luck and being correspondingly grateful for it.

Just throwing another opinion in the mix. I think it's healthy to recognize one's own work in addition to that dumb luck. It's certainly lucky that we liked computers but it's also true that a lot of us worked hard and took advantage of our lucky situations. That's not to say we succeeded on hard work alone, far from it - luck is a crucial part, but it's also unfair to not give yourself a little credit sometimes.

I would say it's unhealthy to think of it as only luck.

It's luck that you like something that is sought after in the job market. But actually spending years learning about it, and sometimes learning things you may not like so much because they are needed for the job, takes effort.

> actually spending years learning about it,

I mean, I did this for fun while I was still in high school. Did I put in a lot of hours? Yes. Were there some frustrating bits? Sure. But I know plenty of people who had to put far more work in to get mediocre grades in their high school qualifications than I've ever put into learning programming.

Being willing to take advantage of the luck by working hard, taking risks, having a vision as to how to succeed and be useful. It is very much about empowering both yourself and others. The luck part is there to help prevent the "I did this, why didn't you?" crappy privileged perspective, but it needs to be balanced with the drive.

As an example, over a decade ago, I quit a job with no plans of getting another one. Someone I knew told me about an opportunity (luck / connections), and I pursued it. It was hard at first, but now it is almost a turn-key operation. Still requires work, but far less than it did at the beginning. It has netted me a good tidy sum which has been crucial for living the life I want.

Was it luck? Absolutely. Was it my own ability, hard work, and willingness to take that step? Yes. What would have happened had I said no? No idea, but probably less of a good outcome.

Ideally, one tries to frame one's life to be empowering but not arrogant, not trivializing the difficulty of other's paths. Luck is not empowering. Belief that hard work alone can get you to the height is not empowering. Some mixture of these things, that can be empowering. Understanding that the goal is to be useful to others as well as yourself, that's really empowering.

Framing any and all success (maybe not what OP is doing, but a lot of people do this so it's probably worth addressing) as "sheer dumb luck" implies that you think there's a lot of things in your life that are outside your control when they really aren't. The OP may have deliberately chose that wording to convey that _in their case_, their love for computers was something they pursued completely and entirely ignorant of it being a high-demand/high-paying field. There's a lot of people that have convinced themselves that the odds of them getting a well paying job and doing better for themselves are approaching zero, for no reason other than believing that the only way to have that happen is to be born into it or to have "sheer dumb luck". That prophecy fulfills itself.

There's luck involved, but it's only part of the story.

Discussions on the role of luck in success pop up here on HN from time to time, and one pattern that stands out to me is that, for a good chunk of people, it seems really important to their sense of identity that luck is at best a minor factor in their success.

Your post is one of the more direct renderings of that point of view: you don't really argue that the parent post is wrong, merely that it's not a healthy way to frame it. Which makes me curious: why do you believe that it is bad for someone to believe that their success is largely caused by luck?

As an aside, personally I subscribe to this view on the interaction of luck and success: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I

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