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A lot of us like the competition and continuous push to improve to keep up.

I am one of those people. This is the environment I've known since high school.

I love it because otherwise there'd be no big challenge to overcome, nothing straightforward to strive for. And this career is one of the few that gives me a very favorable shot at becoming wealthy. That is, wealthy enough to own a home in a beautiful, expensive state while not needing to work until I'm 50+. All without absolutely insane hours after finishing college.

Overall, I'd just be so BORED without the constant push to improve & learn this industry provides. Clearly that isn't for everyone, and obviously the equation changes as one gets older and settles into family life. That's what management is for (I'd say the best managers still dive deep into the newest tech and have a great understanding of everything their organization does, though many I've seen don't do this and still are competent).

If anything, I get the itch that I'm not doing enough all the time. I'm strongly considering entrepreneurship after my current gig for the challenge of that work environment.

You can skip all the school and college stuff though. People get MAGMA jobs off of bad tech jobs and grinding leetcode and nothing else.

> My bonafides: I’m a college drop-out with a background in mathematics who went from teaching and having almost no coding experience to working at a big tech company in SV in ~3 years. The result is not typical, but I’ve seen it repeated enough to know that I’m not just a fluke. I recently saw another college drop-out make the jump in 18 months.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385015

That's really impressive but you sell yourself short. You did do the college stuff just not in CS but in a related difficult field.

And then you had ultra high discipline to work hard for 3 years on top of that to break into software engineering. You didn't skip the process you just did it a bit differently but roughly in the same ballpark of difficulty,

> If you have intrinsic interest in CS that will get destroyed pretty quickly because you may be put on to some super boring project.

Potentially unpopular opinion: This is why I’m actually very bullish on graduates from famously demanding colleges like Ivy League and other competitive universities. To graduate, you can’t just be smarter than average and coast your way through to graduation. You actually have to work hard and be able to self-motivate to do hard things even when it’s not intrinsically interesting.

That doesn’t mean that graduates from average colleges can’t work hard, of course. It’s just much harder to tell if someone has learned to work hard or if they just coasted through life up until this point if you can’t look at their resume and see any particularly difficult achievements.

Are Ivy League colleges famously demanding? I haven't seen their CS departments on any rankings or similar that would imply they're particularly good. Law, sure, but CS? And given some of their most notable graduates, and what it took both to get in, and what led to their successes on getting out, I'm not sure "working hard" would be the description I would give it (though, of course, it's the description they would give, since meritocracy sounds a lot better than oligarchy/good old boy network).

> Are Ivy League colleges famously demanding?

Yes, absolutely. They demand a lot of hard work, much more than your typical public university. As you go through life however, you start to realize that accomplishment comes from working hard on the right things - a subtle but important distinction from plain old hard work.

Imagine that you are running and come to a wall. You are big, strong, and have lots of resources at your disposal. You almost certainly can bust through the wall and keep going. Do you do it? Or do you check to see if there is an unlocked door around the corner? The reward for you is exactly the same (a grade of A in the class; a promotion at work) and you aren't the person that has to clean up the mess you leave behind. What do you do?

The Ivy League schools have plenty of people that would choose one option and plenty that would choose the other. The other schools don't have very many people for which busting through the wall is even an option, which is definitely not the same thing as "working harder"

Grade inflation is a counterpoint here.

> To become really succesful in a tech career the demands are simply too great even if you are in the top percentile in IQ

I don't know if this is true. You have described one particular pathway, but as someone who was formerly a very senior level engineer and is now a pretty senior level PM, and is also a college dropout with no degrees and no appreciably meaning certifications (I have an A+, Network+, and Linux+ I got when I was in high school), I must tell you that there are many many many other pathways into tech. Some of the best programmers I've worked with were people who didn't even study CS, although they usually studied STEM (Physics majors in particular seem to always pop up in my peer groups). Some of the best PMs I have worked with studied "worthless liberal arts degrees" like English Literature. Many of both have no degree at all, just as I don't. Almost nobody I worked with did any impressive internships... or internships at all, rather than going and interning most people just worked on whatever was interesting to them and published either articles about it or the code.

I think the key to success in tech is pretty simple to describe (although harder to execute): Be passionate about technology and invest efforts into your passion areas.

Only some companies LC grind people, but if you want to be at one of those companies there's no gate on LC to enter your credentials before you sign-up... anyone can grind LC. What's far more important in my book, having hired many people, is that I work with and hire people who are actually interested in whatever it is that we are doing. I personally only work on products I find interesting, if I don't think there's any interesting problem to solve there, I go do something else. Nobody has ever asked anything about my lack of college degree in my entire career except IBM, and nobody wants to work at IBM anymore anyway.

In my experience none of what you are talking about is necessary to have a successful tech career. In my case I have an English degree, went to a boot camp, and worked fairly hard at medium sized companies for a few years. I work at a company where I make as much or more than a lot of doctors. A lot of my colleagues are from places like Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc.

I could probably not have even gone to college, it was just getting the first job that mattered. Probably wouldn't have gotten into Google or whatever with that first job, but it isn't hard to work your way up if you interview well.

Maybe we disagree about what "really successful" means. I personally feel that the way things are now if I was actually motivated to make as much as possible I could get promoted and ladder my way up about as far as I wanted to in this industry, but I have no desire to do this because I make plenty of money and only work about 25 hours a week. If I wanted to I could also go work for some exciting startup, but I would have to work a lot harder which is something I don't want to do.

The point being that what you do in high school, college, or even most of your career doesn't really matter that much if you are smart and can actually figure out what you are doing.