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Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

> If you find my following perspective to be overly conservative, I’d gently push back with the observation that most folks I know in or pursuing executive roles view my career decisions as moderately risk-seeking

I wonder if this reflects the demographics of people in executive roles more than anything else.

People who need to take risks to end up in an executive role are naturally filtered out due to risky behaviour, whereas people who have better 'pedigree' (You know what I mean) don't have to take many risks.

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People end up in executive positions largely do so because of connections, with expertise second, at best. They just view life and success as expected because of who they are, so why take risks? If you're a white, male, Ivy League graduate, you're going to succeed regardless. Just coast.

You think all 40,000 per year are going to be successful if they coast? And doesn't it require some tenacity to get into an Ivy school, meaning they're the type of person less likely to coast? This comment comes off as somewhat sour.

> doesn't it require some tenacity to get into an Ivy school

Ivy schools are famously cagey about the number of "legacy" admissions, but the best research suggest they weigh legacy many times more than any other criteria, and legacy admissions make up some %15 of the total. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-coll...

Good, so 85% of students worked hard to get into the Ivy League. But because of the 15% you say that their accomplishments is nothing?

Unironically I have to have conversations with people who rant about private school A grades being worth D's because their accomplishments are nothing.

Naturally now they are sending their children to private school, their children are not being handed everthing on a plate and their grades are great accomplishments.

Envy really does destroy the functional parts of the brain where intellectual honesty resides.

Yep. I went to a good private school (a so called public school in England) and can confirm it does not result in good grades lol. It still requires some drive and care about school to succeed.

This is a joke shared with me in Cambridge:

The difference between the ivies and the others is that the dumbest person at an ivy may well be its richest.

Make of that what you will.

Cambridge isn't exempt - if you're a great rower you can get into Land Economics pretty easily ;)

Cambridge, Massachusetts my love.

Ahhhh, I forget there's another.

Something tells me you don’t have much exposure to executives?

This isn’t true at all.

It’s not pure merit, but no job is. But I’ve seen plenty of executives turfed out of jobs when the CEO failed to hit their numbers and needed a scapegoat.

15 years ago, freshly equipped with an Ivy League degree and a PhD, I was staggered to interact with so many senior executives that had exactly 0 degrees.

A degree is something that a person who conforms to the norms aspires to. Nothing wrong with that, I have a PhD. I got it in the middle of the dot com boom. It's a nice conversation piece but otherwise has zero relevance to what I do. Instead of getting rid in one of the bubble companies or taking a fat salary solving the y2k problem for some boring consulting company, I went off and did research.

Then I pivoted to become a software engineer, and I went back to doing research at an industrial research institute. And via a brief stint doing some more software development I ended up being a startup entrepreneur in my late thirties. That was ten years ago.

In Germany where I live it's an almost automatic salary booster, which is nice except I don't get a salary because I'm a freelance consultant and a bootstrapped startup CTO (might get a salary out of that soon). It's what I did after I got my degree that enables me to charge premium rates when I'm freelancing.

Entrepreneurial mindset and straight career paths via some big name university are two things. One requires taking risk, the other is basically about risk averse careers. Big name universities, followed by big name companies and big title career paths. Again nothing wrong with that. But not a likely path for starting your own company, which is risky.

More to my point, the assumption that every executive is a white ivy league educated male is as accurate as the assumption that everyone in Silicon Valley dropped out of their CS degree at Stamford after a year.

> A degree is something that a person who conforms to the norms aspires to. Nothing wrong with that, I have a PhD.

Yeah, but I’d expect an executive to be that sort of person.

Wouldn't someone who conforms to the norms tend to become the average of that environment?

Depends if you work in a change resistant, conservative environment; or a competitive company that needs to be ruthless and non dogmatic about what it does, why it does it, how it does it, etc.

Very different career paths.

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