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Comment by jeffreyrogers | Hacker News Reader

> There's an ongoing debate over whether or not people skills are undervalued, and perhaps for many people they are, but it's hard to deny that there are many, many more ways for someone who doesn't like social interaction much to get rich. If ads and sales are on the same continuum, then the world's best salespeople are engineers, data scientists, and product managers.

This seems completely wrong to me. If you look at who is the top 0.1% it's either inherited wealth, a few professionals (lawyers, certain medical specialties, etc.) who own their own practices, or people who've managed large groups of people (i.e. business executives). The third group is overwhelmingly full of people with good social skills, and skilled professionals are almost always personable too.

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I wouldn't go as far as to say business executives have good social skills. They are often ruthless, cunning, and deceiving, which makes them successful. If by good social skills you mean the ability to convince (read deceive) a lot of people, then sure they have good social skills. But who wants to have a beer with their CEO, VP of Sales, or other top exec? They are often depicted as wolves or sharks for a reason. It is true that they are good at networking with other people like them, but not really good at empathizing, helping, or caring for others.

Is there some research that would suggest % of ruthless, cunning, and deceiving people among execs is statistically different from any other professions?

Yes, there is some research suggesting that CEOs exhibit "dark triad" traits more then the general population.

Not just CEOs, all people in leadership positions tend to express dark triad traits more strongly, including politicians and the president.

"Ruthless, cunning, deceiving" are very different from "machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy" of the dark triad. And are we saying that definitive driver of execs success is due to having all these traits?

I am not trying to nitpick, and this is totally offtopic from the rest of the thread, but suggesting that huge group of people is more "successful" due to being evil, narcissistic, deceiving, [insert any other trait] seems to be a major bias in itself. Especially if the root cause is having strong emotions due to that group's role in modern society.

OP even jumps from averages and statistics down to making personalised conclusions ("who wants to have a beer with their CEO?"), which is textbook confirmation bias[0].

Unfortunately, I see this kind of argument often here on hacker news.

0 - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/confirmation-bias

> "Ruthless, cunning, deceiving" are very different from "machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy"

That doesn't sound true to me at all, though. How are you defining these terms that there's no overlap between the first set and the second?

> And are we saying that definitive driver of execs success is due to having all these traits?

Mmm no, that's not what I'm asserting. I can't speak for the other poster.

I assume OP means social skill in the sense of “skill with society as the instrument/playground” rather than “skills that benefit social bond”. Same way as a 10x dev at a nonprofit and a Russian hacker can both have “computer skills” while doing vastly different things with their skills.

They're persuasive, which is probably the most important social skill. Having a beer may be a means to that end, but it usually isn't.

Politics, law, finance, the arts, advertising, religion, and the media all rely on persuasion. And because narcissists and sociopaths are so much more credible and charming than introverts and tech nerds, these professions are full of people who make a living selling stories - about themselves, others, and related brands and products.

This is why we have such problems with the constraints of physical or social reality. These people believe their stories. They experience any suggestion they're objectively wrong as an unreasonable threat to their status and self-image.

They feel the same way about any suggestion that other people's stories matter. To them, they don't. If they did matter they'd show some hesitation and nuance, and the persuasion magic would evaporate.

> narcissists and sociopaths are so much more credible and charming than introverts and tech nerds

A big part of this comes down to practice. Anyone who practices chitchat (or "persuasion") all day gets pretty good at it, at least in a narrow niche. Those "tech nerds" who spend a lot of time going to parties can also get good at it; however, many of the introverted tech nerds would rather be writing code or reading a book or whatever, and end up not practicing these skills starting from a young age, and by the time they reach adulthood are far behind. (In just the same way that someone who never spends time exercising ends up far behind in playing sports, or someone who never spends time solving technical problems ends up far behind in technical skill/expertise, etc.)

Beyond that, if the main goal incentivized is just to "make the sale", the methods used aren't going to necessarily ethical. There's a reason that pick-up artists, used car salesmen, carnival barkers, and social-climber middle managers use deception and burn people in the process of getting ahead: it works. If you have a system that selects for "what works" and doesn't negatively select away "causes collateral damage", then you end up (a) making ethical people play with a huge handicap, and (b) chasing them out of the field.

> If by good social skills you mean the ability to convince (read deceive) a lot of people

In a thread about people being rich or not, yes, of course he meant that. There isn't any alternative way to define this.

> The third group is overwhelmingly full of people with good social skills, and skilled professionals are almost always personable too.

All of my fifty closest underlings laugh at my jokes. What more social proof do I need?

Don't look at the top .1%. Look at the top 5% and you find some very rich people who are "self made". They didn't inherit. Even in the top .1% you find the likes of Bill Gates who started out pretty average (there is a lot of luck in his story or course)

Bill Gates' grandpa was a national bank president, and his father was a wealthy lawyer, president of the state bar association. As a child Gates was deliberately trained by his parents to make everything into a contest. He went to the best private prep school in Washington State, and among high school students worldwide, he ended up with something like top 0.01% access to computers at the time. There's nothing "pretty average" about his story; he was part of the top <1% by wealth, prestige, and support right from the get-go. [Which is not to say that Gates didn't work like hell, including making heaps of unethical choices, to end up as a billionaire.]

> Look at the top 5% and you find some very rich people [...]

The top 5% does not predominately consist of "very rich people". The 95th percentile is "upper middle class", people like relatively ordinary white-collar professionals and successful small-business owners including tradespeople who run their own shops, etc. We're talking about "own a nice house, take vacations, and can afford to retire comfortably" money, not "fleet of servants" money.

10%: $168k

5%: $336k

1%: $819k

0.1%: $3.3m

The income curve is a hockey stick that goes vertical at the far right side and it keeps getting steeper over time. https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...

Even in the top 0.1% many are self made. My comment wasn't about whether they are self-made or not (and many people who got a head start in life have done very impressive things, one of the surgeons who pioneered transplant surgery was from a very wealthy midwestern family who made their money from the railroad industry). My comment was about Byrne's assertion that there are more ways to become rich that don't require social skills than ones that do. That doesn't seem true to me.

Not to mention that pretty much all ad sales are managed not by engineers, but by that third business exec group.

> There's an ongoing debate over whether or not people skills are undervalued

For the banks and credit unions where customer service is a key advantage, operations people with good people skills are super important. But because of industry culture, these people are pretty much sh1t upon. It shows in their pay, and in the rapidity with which they are laid off.

I bet there's tons of places where this happens.

> If ads and sales are on the same continuum, then the world's best salespeople are engineers, data scientists, and product managers.

I stumbled over that sentence. I genuinely don’t understand what this means in context. Can someone explain the metaphor and/or the point that’s being made here?

I think he is saying that since digital advertising generates so much revenue the best sales and marketing professionals (by revenue generated) are the engineers, data scientists, and PMs who develop the ad-tech that enables those things. I don't agree with him, but I think that's his argument.

I think this is almost a "not even wrong"* situation.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

Being born into the first two groups gives you a lot more opportunity to learn the social skills that might also land you in that third group. Especially in societies that have some kind of class system (even if that system is 'informal').

> inherited wealth

We keep hearing that. (Because it sounds good).

It should be true because it's not all that hard to keep wealth increasing at least modestly - and let time do the work. But take heart! "The Missing Billionaires" argues that in practice inherited wealth is reliably lost over shockingly few generations.

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