Agreed. Consider: those who don't read HN are probably worse engineers that earn lower salaries, on average.
Inference: 90% of engineers probably think they are smarter than average engineers
I do not think you can segment Engineers different from the society & Humans in General ... There are Arrogant people everywhere, those who think they are in some way better than others. Not just that, they think everyone else is stupid :)
One might also say - they're not smart enough to realize that they are smarter. [But this is another PoV].
I've known too many arrogant engineers to believe this is true.
Some people smarter than other people. And those people, on average will get paid more.
I don't see a whole lot of rage when people talk about how it takes good people skills to get a lot of jobs. But the moment intelligence becomes a requirement, everyone suddenly thinks that's unfair, or there is no such thing as intelligence.
I don't deny that there are many factors leading to higher SV salaries, but intelligence is also a factor.
For example I came from a very ordinary middle class background. To the extent that I have more education and a higher salary than people with the same background, I attribute it to my intelligence. I don't think that makes me better than other people, even though I'm constantly told that having better social skills makes you better than other people. And I don't think that there is a level playing field either, but conditional on my background I still earn a relatively high salary.
The counterpart to the smugness you complain about is your moral smugness. And there is plenty of that on HN too.
We have no reason to think that just because we read a lot of hacker-centric articles we don't have people bringing down the average just like the rest of the world does.
And what does the fact that all the replies disagree, and the post was down-voted, tell you about the existence of an "echo chamber"? (Remember to avoid confirmation bias here!)
Also the poster didn't claim a causal relationship. The claim was the reading HN was correlated to success, not that it caused it.
> An assertion with no evidence, seemingly rooted in a self satisfying sense of superiority The evidence was in the survey, but if you don't believe in a particular causal relationship (in this case, better engineer -> higher salary) then any correlation can always be dismissed as "not evidence".
The assumption of "a self satisfying sense of superiority" was all yours. To many people it's simply obvious that there is a correlation between how good you are at your job and how much you get paid.
I don't mean to be rude, but what data do you have to back this up? Not all engineers are in the "startup game" or have any reason to read the writings of pg. It's very conceivable to me that some engineers making $250k+ a year at a big corporation like Microsoft don't frequently browse Hacker News.
We aren't just programmers. We're a unique blend of hackers and entrepreneurs and those who stumbled on this forum by being inundated with the culture. But you could go through school and find a very well paying job without being on an intellectual, enthusiast forum like this one.
Reading HN is not the be-all-end-all of technical knowledge. In fact, at a certain point it most definitely becomes negatively correlated with productivity (and subsequently value/salary).