Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

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I grew up in the US, my parents are very blue collar, neither of them went to college, and they worked hard to give me and my sibling a decent childhood. I went to the cheapest college I could (a local university you've never heard of) to get a BS in Computer Science.

I worked my ass off, grinding on interview studying, working internships and jumping companies whenever I could get a better offer. I'm about to turn 30 and I made 430k (200k of which is salary) in 2021 working at a big company in the US.

I would not consider my background to be particularly privileged and I don't consider myself to be all that smart, but I managed to get here just by working hard and never getting comfortable. Yes, if you get comfortable in the first tech job you land and just sit around enjoying your life, then you probably won't naturally end up in a place making lots of money.

Obviously being privileged and getting everything handed to you makes landing a nice cushy job much easier, but there are still plenty of paths to these high paying jobs if you're willing to work hard.

Also, as mentioned by another person in this thread, this totally does take a toll on your mental health and you absolutely have to sacrifice things. I gave up a lot of things that would have given me a better quality of life, but those were choices I was willing to make.

You were born and raised in the US. That by itself is already a huge privilege.

also most cs people who are smart tend to think they are average because they are surrounded by other very smart people. I hate that mindset of "oh if you work hard, you too can get a FAANG job making 400k"

I think I'm below average, and then I interview CS grads and "7 years experience in X" on the resume who struggle to write a for-loop, or even write a single line of code at all... I feel like I'm constantly being gaslit.

This has been resonating with me recently: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

It really depends where in the USA. This Harvard project tracks intergenerational mobility. I make more annually than both my parents made combined for their three peak years. https://opportunityinsights.org/ I come from one of the highly mobile counties.

The privilege I am talking about is related to the chances of access to $200k jobs.

Just being born and raised in the US means that you don't have to worry about visa issues, for example. And when I was in the US, I only managed to get my H1B through a quota-exempt employer, meaning I couldn't move around for better offers. I also lost count of how many times I received the "you have very good qualifications but unfortunately we can not sponsor visas" email.

I don't think the privilege is just about being handled things easily, it's also about being able to reach such positions, no matter what the upbringing you had.

A lot of people are going to work as hard or harder than you, but because they chose a different career or because they don't have your set of skills, they'll never reach what you got and that is a huge privilege.

> I don't think the privilege is just about being handled things easily

It seems like there are many cases like this where people have different perspectives because they have different understandings of certain word. E.g. "privilege": to some this doesn't have any implications around fairness, like "you pass the exam and you can get your driver's license; then you have the privilege to drive." To others "you're privileged" has an implicit "which isn't fair, and shouldn't be so* attached.

Oh yes, you are totally right, and I'm not saying I don't have any privileges because I obviously was given a ton of them. You're right, I wasn't born a poor farmer's child in Africa or something, I'm speaking relatively.

If we're just talking about people who already know they want to work in tech and have some access to a technical education, then I think a path to these jobs is absolutely open to pretty much everyone if they are willing to work hard and sacrifice things. Of course it is easier for some people than others, it's not fair.

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