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Comment by tecoholic | Hacker News Reader

I think they are more lucky than privileged. Multiple IPO stock options, both well educated and high paying jobs and shared interests. They seem to have hit right timings multiple times. Things compound.

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Do you think there's any good decision making and hard work involved too, or just pure dumb luck?

I think they are smart enough to take advantage of things. Hard work or not doesn’t matter. For example, assessing that their home in California is worth way more than they make out of it and seeking out a cheaper place to convert that “luck” into profit is definitely their smarts and not privilege.

both. And it's important to remember that. Luck being a main force (which is really true for almost any outcome good or bad). The other forces being talent and labor.

The world is absolutely packed with incredibly hard working people who make excellent decisions and die like a dog of a preventable disease in a slum somewhere.

Yes, luck. Hard work is table stakes. It is necessary but wholely insufficient. We shouldn't make the mistake of over-attributing our successes to hard work and ignore the massive social and economic advantages that let us capitalize on the work we do. Everyone else works hard too, they just don't get to reap the benefits of that labor.

I agree. I grew up poor, was accepted to every college I applied to, but couldn’t afford any of them so I joined the Navy instead.

10 years later, after a brief stint as an Electrical Distribution Engineer, Samsung hired me because one of their Directors at their Austin plant was specifically seeking out Navy Nuclear-trained Electronics Technician senior leaders — pure luck. While I was there, working nights on a 4/3 - 3/4 schedule, I got into UT Austin’s SWE MS program. That was hard work, and those 2 years are largely a blur. My wife also pulled more than her fair share of work taking care of our extremely young kids, lest I claim I was the I only one working hard.

After that, I convinced a hiring manager that I could do SRE work despite having zero industry experience, because I explained how I had done most of their job description at home. That was a mix of hard work and luck, I guess? Then it’s like any other industry: if you have experience, you can get interviews.

Meanwhile, I have family on both sides who have worked much harder than I have, and have far less to show for it. Tech pays absurdly well in many sectors, and I think people often forget that on here.

I agree with your core point that luck is necessary, but thinking that everybody works hard is simply fiction.

I hear a lot about these mythical slobs and slackers that we're all so much better than. I very rarely meet them. I mostly run into people doing their best with the resources they've got available to them.

The failure mode is not people that are supposed to work eight hours a day and then only work seven or six. And I don't really think of them as slobs or slackers. What they do is they come into the job and they turn the crank. They don't really think deeply about the impact they're trying to have. They do sort of what they're told, even if it leads to a dead end. And then maybe at some point they'll report that they hit a wall and you can loop back with them and adjust the plan. Iteration loops with these sorts of folks tend to be quite long. Decisions take more time than they should, and simple tasks turn into complex negotiations.

I manage engineering teams by day, so I've seen my fair share of folks that have these traits. They're not bad people, but they don't care about the quality of their work, and they're not thinking very hard about what they're producing.

Both. Everybody gets good and bad luck, nothing you can do about that. However hard work will make a major difference in the outcome. His good luck was in large part only possible because of working for the right company at least hard enough to not get fired. (a different post says he is a principal engineer which implies a lot of hard work to get - edit: also good luck that someone else wasn't also working that hard and got selected, but second to principal engineer is probably still a good income)

And luck creates privilege!

100%. It's hard work and good luck/timing, not privilege.

The dad is an architect. So probably rich enough to afford (good) education and putting Kenton in the right place at the right time.

My dad was able to pay for me to attend the University of Minnesota.

More importantly though was that my parents fed my childhood fascination with computers, making sure I had the opportunity to learn to code early (a volunteer at my school taught me BASIC at age 8; my parents bought me a PC so I could continue experimenting) and then they gave me a lot of free time to spend building things and learning. After I graduated my mom let me spend a couple more years in her basement just working on open source software projects. These are certainly privileges that wouldn't be possible if my dad didn't have comfortable income.

I got into Google by applying on the web site and showing them my projects.

You are likely engaging as a good sport (and the anecdata are fun) but you don't really need to explain yourself, if that's what you are trying to do.

Life is all shades of precarious, unfair, galtonboard-ish, windfall-ish. Pareto-powerlaw-nonergodic-pissed off pikachu-ish. Have fun. Somebody's got to.

Yeah I just think it's fun to tell the story.

Can't rule out privilege without knowing a bit more background. Most people work hard, it increases the odds of success but isn't necessary.

Cant always say its hardwork... As a people observer there seems to be a lot of people coasting, or doing as little as possible, and yet get promoted, or they get into really high paying positions. This is far more common in larger corporations, where the visibility is lower.

In smaller companies the people are definitely worth their weight in gold as if they are not doing the work its very visible.

Yeah, I am jealous, but such is life...

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