But if the goal is, "strong enough programmer to write a spell-check algorithm from first principles," then work-effort might very well compensate for a lack of advantages in upbringing or other "luck-factors."
The point here is that going to such extremes isn’t really interesting.
I mean, from there you can move on to similar cases where bad luck trumps any amount of ability. For example, what sucks about being impoverished? Not having good access to a computer, right? From there it's not hard to draw on other things (e.g. abuse, bad culture, poverty) that make having good computer access a huge challenge. It becomes pretty apparent that luck plays a huge factor in success.
Pretty interesting to me.