I see this a lot and I know that there are a lot of factors that contribute to someone's overall success and failure. But there is the saying that "when opportunity knocks hard work is what answers" it just seems to me that working hard at what ever you are doing is always a good thing even if it doesnt guarantee success it seems like laziness always guarantees failure.
I think that's what the article was trying to relate to when it wrote, "If you’re not prepared when an opportunity comes along, what the hell difference does it make? If you’re not prepared, you won’t be able to capitalize on an opportunity if one happens to come along. But you still have to be lucky to get that opportunity."
Is not working hard always a result of lazyness? what even is lazyness? Humans have an inate sense of fairness, if you look around and see people getting more for no clear reason, get a sense the game wont reward you fairly and choose to focus on other things, is that lazyness?
It's a good way to get the game to reward you even less, and then to blame the game for doing so. That might comfort people, but it doesn't help them very much...
> Humans have an inate sense of fairness, if you look around and see people getting more for no clear reason, get a sense the game wont reward you fairly and choose to focus on other things, is that lazyness?
No, but it might lead to it. You might see the CEO getting a million a year, but you don't see him financing his company from his hard-saved own money, possibly risking everything he has, and putting in 12 hour days for years to not go under. You only hear of his paycheck at the end of the month. Throwing your towel because you think his current work is worthless does not do you any good.
Now, sure, there are lazy CEOs who inherited the company or got lucky otherwise. It's not fair to some extent. But simply defaulting to doing nothing does not help you get anywhere, either - you're just hurting yourself.
So, if you think someone is getting more than you, you should really check whether the is a non-obvious reason they're getting more and whether the doing nothing in spite really brings you forward.
A lot of rewarding jobs open to everyone are really hard and it's fair game to say you don't care that much about success, playing games is fine. But just complaining because "they have more and I want it too" is laziness (pointing out actual inequality and proposing solutions, on the other hand, is not).
The concept of "laziness" is bulls*t to me - humans have an innate drive to survive, learn & be curious about surroundings, plan and gather resources.
The only way to halt that is by experiencing something out of your control: bad parenting & trauma, burn-out, depression, ADHD. If someone wants to fix their "laziness" they gotta get help for those.
> Achieving immense success requires hard work, dedication, perseverance, and — perhaps most importantly — lots of luck. But oftentimes, luck doesn't get as much credit as it deserves.
I think at this point luck gets far more of a focus than it deserves. It's become a thought-terminating cliche around the entire idea of why people succeed or fail.
Almost no one disputes that luck is a component of people making their fortunes, its caked into the word. (Fortuna, the goddess of luck, gives the word its first definition, the second definition as a large amount of money came later).
There's no 'most importantly' about immense success. No one is an Olympic medalist by accident. No one found their way to the moon by accident. And while luck was involved, no one became an oil tycoon by or started an ISP or laid underseas cables by tripping into it.
Luck (and/or nepotism) ultimately decides the success or failure of two equally hard working individuals or groups. In your Olympic medalist example, do you believe that the person that placed 4th and thus did not medal didn't work as hard as the Gold/Silver/Bronze? Or did they just not have the "luck" of having the genetics/life scenarios that are most conducive to winning their respective competition?
Ultimately I think "work hard" is generally good advice to be "good enough" or "above average", but actual success in the scale that you're describing definitely comes down to luck, because everyone in contention is working extremely hard.
This is a classic conflation; comparing real life success (where you would hopefully not choose to place yourself into a highly competitive business environment, unless you had a unique ability to win) versus a contrived scenario like the Olympics, where success is literally pitting two highly talented people in a competition where both cannot win.
In business, you can open a restaurant and be just as successful (or as unsuccessful) as your counterpart on a different street, or even right next door. There is no first and second place medalist in that scenario.
Life is not a competition unless you choose to make it one. There can be only one President at a time; only one gold medalist at a time in any event, but there can be many Elon Musks or Kanye Wests. Ultra-performing people work hard to get to the top, and then the same habits that put them there expand their "lead", but Elon Musk isn't in direct competition with anyone else at being the best Elon Musk he can be.
This seems way off. The number of engineers working at FAANG is in the hundreds of thousands, an athlete that is 100000th best in the world is basically a hobbyist rando.
It's all relative. There are more professional software engineers than professional weight lifters. The top 1% work at FAANG, the top 1% go to the olympics.
The whole Olympic roster for the US is ~500 people. There's half a million people who are current NCAA athletes, that's an order of magnitude off right there, even after excluding football and before counting in the actual pros.
This example kind of falls apart with respect to the Olympics for an array of reasons. If you're looking at NCAA athletes, lots of those sports are not represented in the Olympics. Also, because spots in the Olympics are limited, the "best" person isn't always chosen to represent a given country for a given sport.
This thread is clearly about comparing the probabilities of getting into FAANG vs getting into the Olympics. The situation with varying relative competitiveness of the local "scene" in a particular country is the same in both cases, despite the fact that even the 1% figure for FAANG engineers would only work under the assumption of the global pool of candidates (~20 mil software engineers worldwide), all willing to relocate and prioritizing FAANG above all other employers (a lot of assumptions). Tldr: no, being kinda good at leetcode is not an Olympic-level feat, try the ICPC.
You're kinda just...debating with yourself. Your TLDR isn't anything even remotely close to anything I ever said or suggested. Equating everyone in the NCAA to every professional software engineer is super silly; it'd be a better comparison to say the entire NCAA and everyone that took a coding class sometime in their education.
If you scroll up you'll find this discussion is about luck vs. hard work. I'll be stepping out of this specific comment thread now though. Enjoy your night.
> This is a classic conflation; comparing real life success (where you would hopefully not choose to place yourself into a highly competitive business environment, unless you had a unique ability to win)
Two people that are extremely talented interviewed for a position in which there is only 1 opening. One is selected, one isn't. Is this not a competition? Did the person that wasn't selected work less hard?
Working hard puts you in contention for lots of extremely competitive things in life. Often times, luck is the thing that decides which of the extremely talented, hard working individuals succeed and at what scale.
> Or did they just not have the "luck" of having the genetics/life scenarios that are most conducive to winning their respective competition?
Most likely they did minimal errors or had slightly unfortunate conditions; when it comes down to fractions of a second, minimal performance differences most likely don't matter to much.
But all of these people still were at the Olympics. And you bet everyone making it there worked their ass off to get there. Going back to the Fortunes, this might be the equivalent of the "unlucky" exit at a few hundred million, instead of making it to the billions. Which is actually a nice parallel: You might need a bit of luck, but you also need the work.
> Most likely they did minimal errors or had slightly unfortunate conditions;
Not all of "luck" is in the moment, is my point. Some of the luck is where you're born, who your family is, what seemingly inconsequential decisions you make.
The article isn't comparing different people at the top, it's comparing the top and not-top. In my Olympics example what is salient is the median person who made it to the Olympics vs the median person. Reframing it is veering from the point of the article and my comment.
The GP calls genetics "luck" in the context of dichotomy between being self made and luck... if genetics is luck, then what is left for "self"? Ability to work hard is also the product of genetics, upbringing and circumstances, so at that point the distinction becomes meaningless.
Sure, but no reasonable person can expect to become a billionaire or Jamie Oliver by working hard. Who's surprised by that at all? Hard work is great for getting a comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle with a couple of houses, a boat and the top tax bracket.
This sounds like a bit of a strawman. My impression has been that all things being equal hard work on average gives you a leg up. Not that hard work by itself definitely will deliver success.
If anything, avoiding work by working hard to find ways to automate things and make them less work is what brings more success rather than just putting in 14 hours digging a ditch or hammering in railroad spikes.
Now in pop culture i think hard work is doing the necessary dirty work that pays off in the future. Working a job and taking that money and plowing it into something that will deliver more money for less work. Working hard at a bakery, taking those earnings to start something else that provides returns on other people’s work like a salon owner renting out salon space after years of pouring work into developing a brand or whatever.
> When you get into the top ranks of any profession, there are so many people who are so good that the difference in skill level is almost imperceptible.
I don't think data support this. Talent efficacy is more of a power law distribution than a sigmoid. Simone Biles is not a very marginally better gymnast. Elon Musk is not a modestly more enthusiastic car company CEO. Michael Phelps was not slightly better at swimming.
The differences between the best and the almost-best at extremely high levels of skill is much larger than the differences between modestly talented individuals.
I think it's better to segment in terms of percentiles.
Biles, Musk, and Phelps are in the top 1% of their professions. They stand out a lot.
The folks in the top 10% are often way more comparable and differences between them are negligible. It takes something special/extra to stand out in this crowd, and for many of them, it's not about working any harder to make it to the top 1%.
It takes a lot of luck/opportunity, and extraordinary natural talent to become part of this 1% group. Which is why their success is not easy to replicate. And it can come from anywhere. None of these people had parents or families in the top 10% of the same profession.
Elon Musk is the poster boy for being mediocre but being in the right place at the right time, then leveraging power law gains after that. Enthusiasm is not a skill.
Getting rich off paypal doesn't directly translate into the success of SpaceX and Tesla. Both of those were massive gambles with a lot of minute details that needed to go right.
Government handouts do not guarantee successful aerospace and automotive startups. Those industries are notoriously hard to break into. Any business that had gotten to that point in those industries would have gotten those same subsidies.
First - if you want to raise money today in silicon valley - the place is flooded with money.
Second - elon's not (that) famous for paypal or his other earlier companies - he's famous for tesla and spacex. Even as a rich person he put a huge amount of money into them relative to net worth.
Third - he did this and took on two entranched systems. In space he took on the existing govt backed space launch system type industry. These were players with BILLIONs of annual costs for very little return (SLS will be $20B to develop and $2B+ per launch). He's offering launches in $50M - $100M range by comparison. Etc etc. 100+ launches so far (SLS has zero even though govt spent many billions on it).
For cars - he had to build his entire car charging network, fight dealers and their govt cronies, fight oil, all while govt / politicians were spending billions again on this hydrogen superhighway nonsense.
Twice you say that Musk is fighting the government, but he is not. Neither Space X or Tesla would exist if taxpayers weren’t giving him billions in corporate welfare.
In space the idea that SpaceX was the ones being subsidized vs EVERY OTHER provider is ridiculous. I mean - it's a flat lie.
You need to look at what govt is paying for existing defense / industrial launches. What they spend on development. Asia / Russia / Europe and US.
Atlas the govt paid $15B+ to develop and then 200M+ per launch.
Most other programs have been govt funded / cost+ contracts. SLS fits this.
Can you give me a specific example of the "billions" spaceX has gotten in "corporate welfare"? They are providing the deal of the century on development and ops costs, and are putting in far more private capital then most other providers as well, taking much more performance risk (ie, not all cost+ contracts) etc.
The idea that this approach is somehow more costly than the pure pork style of the past is a pretty bold claim.
I did not claim Musk is alone in receiving corporate welfare. My argument is that he’s positioned to receive corporate welfare due to his being in the right place at the right time with PayPal. Plenty of other mediocre people are also receiving billions in taxpayer handouts.
Can you give an example of the SpaceX "corporate welfare". Please be as specific as possible - that will help make this claim more understandable and we can discuss the specifics of this welfare.
There's really no detailed notes on any SpaceX subsidies.
The article talkes about $1.3B Nevada provided Tesla for a battery factory in Nevada. Digging a bit deeper, you find that these are mostly tax incentives commonly used by all auto mfgs and these are not actually cash payments.
Again, tesla is not unique in getting support from the govt (and likely has received relatively little over its lifetime compared to others).
Ridiculous FIFO inventory valuation methods allowed for tax purposes. etc.
The actual incentives here are things like 10 year waiver of property taxes. That's not super uncommon if you built out somewhere that is less developed, which gigafactory nevada did.
Usually corp does have to pay some user fees and covers much more onsite stuff than you would see in an urban area for example (ie, Tesla would generally need to run onsite fire protection management vs Nevada building a fire station next to factory).
The idea is that after 10 years you've helped build a manufacturing base, the land and area is (much) more valuable, and long run your tax base in significantly increased. But since nothing much is there to start with you don't charge someone that much to develop it (you may even pay them in some cases though nevada may not have).
Note that businesses take this same approach with each other frequently. Intel wouldn't help Apple with chip for first iphone, Samsung (ARM) did. Was a good investment for ARM.
You keep misrepresenting me and arguing with a straw man. I did not say Musk is alone in receiving corporate welfare, in fact I said there are many others receiving it as well. My point is that Musk is an example of a hyper connected individual who is able to get special handouts from the government.
> First - if you want to raise money today in silicon valley - the place is flooded with money.
There's more to it than merely "wanting" to raise money. First, build a product, then market the product, get customers, get revenue, and then start pitching like crazy and hope that you get investment before your own savings or friends and family round money runs out.
If you're aware of a more straightforward or reliable path, I would love to hear about it.
Elon Musk is by no means mediocre either in intelligence or in business talent. But I guess randos on the internet will always have a godly opinion of themselves...
Elon Musk is mediocre, he’s just massively propped up with taxpayer money. There’s a laundry list of incredibly stupid things he’s done that don’t stick just because he has insane amounts of cash.
> But I guess randos on the internet will always have a godly opinion of themselves...
I made no comment on myself. This is an ad hominem.
Two of those “businesses” only exist because they are funded by taxpayers. It’s a form of regulatory capture Musk spun up off the back of his PayPal money.
If this was the case we wouldn't see a dearth of EV options from the competition. If regulatory capture was so profitable a big incumbent would've moved in by now.
Certainly Musk isn’t the only beneficiary of corporate welfare. I don’t know the background of those other CEOs, but it’s safe to say if you’re getting billions in government handouts, you already have a good deal of personal wealth and connections.
I love the phrase "Enthusiasm is not a skill". I think it is great. I am not for or against in terms of your idea. I just wanted to comment on the phrase :)
> Michael Phelps was not slightly better at swimming.
If you look at individual records he literally was just ~1% better than the previous record holder. His 200m freestyle record was 102.96, the previous record was 104.06. The whole field is people making slight improvements on previous generations.
> Elon Musk is not a modestly more enthusiastic car company CEO
Many attempts at electric cars were there, his happened to be at the time when battery tech had become good enough. A few decades earlier we'd look at him they same way we look at Clive Sinclair after his electric car effort, despite a previous notable contribution in the computer market.
The data shows it’s the opposite in basically every human endeavor. The greatest are far ahead of the merely great, it’s a law of the normal distribution
Using Michael Phelps as an example, because his talent is extremly quantifiable.
According to wikipedia, his career best 200m short course freestyle time is 1:42.78 [0].
In contrast the cobsideration time for 2019-2020 high school boys 200m freestyle is 1:51.05 (I think this is the same event, but Phelp's short and long course time are close enough that the point holds even if there is a slight difference in the event definition).
In quantitative terms, the best swimmer humanity has to offer is about 7.4% better than a bunch of highschoolers.
In objective terms, both in absolute time and percentage improvement an increase at skill in swimming has a much larger effect on less skilled swimmers. And this result holds true for almost all skills.
Looking at world records, of the 39 world records he has set, 35 have been beaten by others. [0]
Sports like swimming are designed specifically to amplify marginal differences. That is why so much effort goes into accuratly timing them: the difference in their times is marginal.
Luck and the family you were born into are two of the big things you can't change. Doesn't matter how much you acknowledge it, it won't change.
Putting in the hard (and smart) work and persevering is all you can do. It's a waste of time and energy to worry about Kylie Jenner calling herself a self-made billionaire or whether others are just "luckier" than you.
Disclaimer: I am probably a target audience of the article and maybe a bit biased. I was "lucky" many times in my life which allowed me to move from a family income of around $30k growing up, to around $400k solo now.
My only problem with those engaging in such behavior comes from the subset of them who have much more privilege than vast majority of Americans - like say upper middle class and wealthy minorities. They often tilt the system even more in their favor over other poor, struggling Americans of whatever color or creed.
Many highly educated, wealthy female Brahmin Indian-Americans (2nd+ gen) are particularly adept at manipulating the system in this way to benefit them as "POCs" who grew up in exclusive neighborhoods with wealthy parents, and end up at Ivies. And yet constantly leverage their "oppression".
Everyone tries to change the system to favor them. Those who succeed try to distract from this by, for example, promulgating catchy aphorisms like the one above.
I think it's important not to get too cynical about this. It's simply not true that everybody is out there trying to adapt the world to their narrow personal interests. I can think of all kinds of policy issues for which I support a position that is unlikely to benefit me directly.
Sure. There is a form of argument that I call "proof by aphorism" or proof-by-catchy-slogan. One of the best and ultimately most effective examples of this was Johnny Chochran's "if it doesn't fit you must acquit" during the OJ Simpson trial. That argument was more effective because it rhymed despite the fact that this is clearly a logical fallacy.
"Those who can do..." is similar. It's catchy, and because it's catchy people are more likely to believe it, particularly those who are fortunate enough to enjoy the survivorship bias of success. But like Cochran's slogan, it is not true.
But proof-by-aphorism is hard to counter with actual logic. I mean, look at the argument I am presenting right now. Don't you think it's starting to get a little tedious? Do you not find yourself tempted to tune out? Don't you think a lot of people probably already have?
The sad fact of the matter is that the most effective counter to proof-by-aphorism is often another aphorism. If the counter-aphorism is not entirely true, well, that is just part of the point. And the other sad fact of the matter is that many people achieve success not by "doing" but by gaming the system. Not all, but a lot. So I think it's very disingenuous of anyone to get up on a high horse about less successful people trying to similarly tilt the odds in their favor.
Don't think that'll be doable. Luck plays a huge role, even the birth lottery - not just your parents, but your location. Which country you're born into can largely decide your fate as Immigration has been getting harder by the years.
Effective taxes, socialized health and welfare and safer communities. Collective bargaining at work. Those things should level a lot of the big bumps out.
It helps the poor be less poor but it doesn't help the poor become rich. Plenty of countries does those things and the poor still mostly remains poor, albeit with a better standard of living. A reason could be that when poverty hurts like it does in USA it motivates people to work hard to get a better job, while in countries where poverty isn't a big deal people can just choose to live the simple and easy life without much consequences.
I know I do it, I live in such a country and choose to live on much less than the least paid workers gets. I don't need more, and the low spending lets me work almost nothing and still get by. I don't feel I lack anything, and neither do any of the poor people I see here. College was free, healthcare is free, entertainment is super cheap with free public parks with sports areas and cheap internet, transportation is cheap with public transit and most stuff you need is within walking distance anyway.
If instead I was an American citizen I'd work a lot harder to avoid all the shit that can happen to you when you lack money there. I'd be richer on paper, but in practice I think I'd be worse off.
This is really not about getting a particular outcome (which is too subjective/relative to even have a meaningful conversation). This is about the reality and perception that there is some correlation between effort and outcome. You clearly feel that there is a correlation — whether you “utilize” it is your decision to make, as you explain, but you believe it is there. Many Americans dispute the existence of the correlation itself.
Note the parent didn't claim we should eliminate luck as a component of success, but rather adjust society, bit by bit, over time, so that luck is less of an effector.
That would require the US becoming more like Europe, in which the right-tail is thinner but the middle is fatter. Americans like the idea that they can join the right-side of the tail even if the odds are low. Germany has lower wages and higher taxes but more stability and security. It's a trade-off.
There are other ways to reduce the influence of luck other than the European safety model.
For example, reduce regulation, improve education, enforce anti-trust laws (which I see as a different thing than general regulation that is regressive toward small business), increase access to capital, reduce legal and administrative costs of business, etc. Reduce the influence of crony capitalism.
It isn't the thought of not being lucky that makes this sting.
It is the connotation among the wealthy that people in poverty aren't working hard enough. It creates an environment where the job creators create jobs with nowhere to go, all the while toting this idea that they create huge opportunity for others.
No one is creating jobs with nowhere to go on purpose. Business owners create jobs that fulfill the needs of the business in the most cost effective manner possible. For instance, what growth can a mom and pop restaurant or grocery store offer it's employees? None. Is that because they don't think poor people are working hard enough? Of course not.
Then offer them training and experience. Give your best worker a fancy title in lieu of a raise to pad their resume. Enabling someone to grow doesn't mean you get to keep them forever. Unless, of course, you truly are giving people jobs in the hopes that they will have nowhere better to go. Which is also extremely common.
I recall a woman who owned a hair salon who asked Bernie Sanders about providing health insurance to her workers. Her point was that she is about to grow her business, but if laws are passed that force her to provide insurance for her employees she won't be able to expand.
Bernie let her off easy, but if she had asked me I would have told her that her business obviously isn't providing the kind of value to society that it needs to in order to grow larger. What's the point? To enslave more people that you never intend to provide a living wage too? If you go out of businesses maybe a salon will open that can afford to provide a decent wage to the same employees you take for granted.
Training and experience doing what? What fancy title can you give someone who runs a register at your store to pad their resume?
Insurance, sure. That's just another part of comp that you can provide. It's not as straight forward as just money, but it's certainly much easier than training employees for jobs you don't offer.
Claiming to be "self-made" isn't directly advocating that the poor need only pull harder on their bootstraps, but it's only a few steps apart.
If someone believes you can be "self-made" without also necessarily also having a substantial amount of luck, that someone can't explain the gap between success and mere subsistence as anything but "lack of determination", often with a moralistic tone.
The very successful shape our society with their influence, which they wield in advancement of their beliefs. If those beliefs are incomplete, or lack empathy, it affects all of us.
the anti-"self-made" rhetoric is eventually going to backfire. There are plenty of people who are only modestly privileged, or even hugely privileged that had to pull through a ton of bullshit or work hundred hour weeks, oftentimes succeeding in spite of what they had to endure, that bristle at the connotation that because they happened to grow up with some amount of privilege, everything they did is unearned.
Even if they were wrong and "they would have made it anyways" devaluing someone's effort like what I see happening these days (and moreover, socially pressured to shut up about it) is not a sustainable strategy for ameliorating social disparity.
Let's look at this scientifically. Being successful takes 100 units of energy. If one monkey starts with 0 units of energy and another monkey starts with 90 units of energy, how many units must each monkey spend to become "successful?"
Now imagine the monkey who spent 10 units of energy sitting on Ellen's couch telling the world about how hard he pulled on those bootstraps.
The median American has a pretty easy life growing up, they don't have any reasons why they can't succeed yet they almost never do anyway. And there is no reason to believe that the poor Americans would do better than the median Americans if they were given the resources of median Americans.
> they don't have any reasons why they can't succeed yet they almost never do anyway
This seems like a failure of imagination to me.
Having adequate food and shelter is a long way from being able to start a profitable business, and it can even be the case that as society becomes more prosperous it becomes HARDER to start a business. Example: try starting a restaurant with the regulations today vs 1950.
If the monkey with zero gains 5 and the monkey with ninety loses 5, the monkey with zero was more successful.
It's not enough to look at where someone is, you have to look at where someone started. If you are a millionaire and your dad was a billionaire, you are probably one of the biggest losers on the planet.
What if you had super rich parents and you decided to become a school teacher (~$60k/yr in the US)?
Being raised rich taught you that wealth isn't everything, in fact it can be quite toxic and maddening.
So you end up owning a house and some retirement investments after 40 years, but most of all feel proud of the work you've done and the lives you've bettered.
To be called the biggest loser in the world seems like a stretch.
Your business mogul father had said the same thing to you. He seemed to believe money was the only thing that mattered.
Luckily you were not that shallow or self-deceived and realized that living a humble life and taking the time to work with your students one-on-one was true value you could provide.
Unlike your father, you will leave this world having given more than you took. You will have truly empowered the children to work for a better world than the one they were born into.
I don't see how A comes to B. How does telling people that they're not as self-made as they think they are some how excaerbate social disparity?
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Fwiw, I don't believe in being self-made because everyone's idea of "a ton of bullshit" is different.
I feel like by American standards I'm "self-made". I taught myself how to program as a kid and made a career for myself that pays extremely well (I work at a "FAANG-adjacent" company, equitable pay).
My parents didn't co sign any loans, I didn't even go to college. No connections ever involved in getting a job, no friends of parents for summer jobs or anything. Just mind numbing famounts of hours spent single mindedly working on things from childhood to adulthood. Struggling to teach myself, struggling against everyone telling my I was wasting my time (in their defense, I almost didn't graduate high school over how focused I was on projects that ultimately didn't become anything), sacrificing a lot of what most people experience growing up because I was convinced this was what mattered.
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But then you have my parents. My dad grew up with a father who was a non-functioning alcoholic in a 3rd world country. He'd farm for yams to get a few cents to pay for school uniforms. He'd walk a mile out to his friend's house in the middle of the night to be able to read by a lantern because they didn't have one.
My mother's father died and a young age and she had to grow up with relatives who didn't hide their disdain for her. As I've grown older I've realized she downplays how bad her situation was growing up, but in the end she wanted to continue education and they forced her to be a seamstress, so she taught herself to type (in the days of typewriters not computers) and joined the police as a secretary in her country.
Today my dad has a PhD and my mother has her doctorate. Compared to them I might as well have been handed the world in a silver platter for the simple reason, at least I had time. I wasn't struggling to find food, I wasn't cleaning up after my father after he soiled himself in a drunken stupor. My parents might not have agreed with what I was doing, and it might have brought conflict between us, but they didn't hate me.
Of course if you look around you'll find someone who would make their story look like they got a silver platter. After all, at the very least in their poverty they still had peace. They weren't dodging bullets, they weren't in a war-torn country or something.
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That's why I have no problem with social pressure telling "modestly privileged, or even hugely privileged" people to shut up about how absolutely terrible the odds were and how they struggled. Everything is relative.
Put a prince who's never lifted a finger to even wash his face in an upper middle class life and he'll cry real tears struggling to figure out how a 9-5 works.
There's nothing wrong with giving him a shoulder to cry on, but there's nothing useful or teachable about his struggle (except maybe driving home the how deep his privilege was...) I'd much rather hear from what it took people with much less to get to where they are. There's often more to learn there.
Telling people who have actually worked hard that they are "privileged" and dismissing their success is also bad.
Look at this block of text that you wrote. It's almost entirely all about yourself. You weren't listening at ALL to what my claim is.
Suppose you're middle class, and you haul ass to get ahead. You're not born into abject poverty or anything, but you really DID need to work hard. And some asshole, who probably hasn't worked nearly as hard as you, comes around and tells you "well, you made it because you're white, male, or tall" or whatever (I, personally am only one of those things). AND you can't complain about the metanarrative, because you'll get cancelled, or whatever.
This is not a "prince who's never lifted a finger". This is someone who had to struggle.
Thanks for the laugh. To miss the point so amazingly, it's beautiful.
Woeeee is you, you struggled sooooooo hard and now some random person tells you that you only made it because X and that will somehow social disparity... because?
What, you're going to be extra mean to people who aren't in your social strata or something now? Like us vs them or something?
I mean, you realize:
Suppose you're middle class, and you haul ass to get ahead. You're not born into abject poverty or anything, but you really DID need to work hard. And some asshole, who probably hasn't worked nearly as hard as you, comes around and tells you "well, you made it because you're white, male, or tall" or whatever (I, personally am only one of those things).
Thats... that's me. Literally word for word. Down to "one of those things". Or did you... not realize most of the comment is not about me?
Someone tells me that I only made it because I'm male and I won't even give them the time of day! How often is this happening to you that you're crying about it?!
And if I was forced to reply, it's so easy to say the absolute truth: being male didn't hurt! Like holy shit, I struggled and sacrificed but being male never hurt!
Maybe that's what's really hurting you? The fact that despite struggling, there's some property of your path that was out of your control but made the path easier? Yup that's how it is.
No one is 100% self-made. Being cognizant of that helps you be a better person.
That’s why we ought to give people a sense of the odds. The chance that you’ll be a $400k income earner is somewhere around 1 in 100, so not too likely.
You can increase your odds by getting certain kinds of degrees and by living in certain areas, but odds are still going to be against you. I’m not sure how much since I don’t have the conditional probabilities at hand.
Try to get your hands on the stats to set your expectations accordingly. Good luck out there!
The chance gets greatly increased if you are smart though. A smart person with a stem degree is would easily get a $400k salary by joining Google (they mostly test for intelligence so not hard to join for a smart person) and staying for 10 years.
"Being born smart is luck"
Depends on how you view it, we normally say luck are things that doesn't affect merit. "You were lucky to be born being able to do stuff others can't", well sure but that is how society should work, a person who provides more value should naturally get more of the rewards. Otherwise you'd have to say things like "Einstein discovered all the things he did almost solely thanks to luck!".
Getting a STEM degree is a low probability event, say 1 in 10, then getting in google is another low probability event, say 1 in 10. So making it sound easy/likely seems misleading. I was acknowledging that there are things you can do to improve your odds. Einstein didn’t make it into the Google of his day. He worked as a patent clerk for some time while working on groundbreaking physics until he was accepted.
It’s okay to be an average income earner, most are. Don’t get too hung up on something that isn’t likely for you.
Also don’t forget what is valued can change. A farmer might be very lucky and valued, by a chance turn of events. If your doing well, be kind and try to raise the floor up for lesser income earners. Maybe they’ll remember you well if you have a turn of bad luck.
Google tests for traditional Computer Science skills taught in a typical set of Algorithms classes at a 4 year degree program. A 400k/yr job at Google hired externally would typically be an individual with 10+ years of experience solving hard problems in production with exposure across organizational, engineering, management, and research domains.
It's a fairly recent phenomena that Google began hiring from most universities at the college level, in 2010 they didn't even perform campus recruiting at all of the top-40 universities let alone dedicate valuable phone screen and interview time to candidates outside of top university programs with high GPAs.
Hell this is the company founded by Stanford PHDs that famously required industry hires to furnish proof that they held a GPA higher than 3.5!
The odds aren't quite 1 in 100 for the typical individual weighing their options at High School age. Typically one would need to get a degree from a good school which requires both money (Harvard costs $198k for 4 years now), and a school good enough to create Harvard admissions (1 in 6 students attend a dropout factory), and a stable enough home life that one isn't compelled to simply work to support the family/themselves at graduation.
There's of course a ton of luck involved but you won't get struck by lightning by sitting at home.
I've tried to increase my "luck" by forcing myself to do things that have an asymmetric payoff: meeting new people, writing blog posts, saying yes to things, etc
I increased my luck by making five year goals, thinking about what behaviours I'd need to adopt to reach these goals and then making those activities a priority. I'm incredibly successful by my own metrics now and I'm very happy with how my life is turning out.
Doing what you need to do and not what is easy pays huge dividends.
There is an immense societal advantage in the belief that people can do anything if they work hard enough. Without this belief most workers would optimize for minimal effort. If we create a society where forward advancement is impractical eventually people will optimize towards the latter and actively dissuade others from trying to be better.
The peasant doesn’t think they’ll become a lord by working harder.
Because my decision of getting involved in a business or situation in which the outcome (say, we are able to somewhat make a qualitative estimate) is 10% effort and talent and 90% luck would be different if the % are reversed. That's one of the many reasons for reflecting on the odds.
Exactly. People can't do anything to ensure success, but they can definitely ensure failure. All anyone can do is the best they can, so that when and if lucky opportunities arise, they can capitalize on those opportunities.
Same thing with dating. There are no magic words or social skills to ensure that the person someone likes, will like them back. There are lots of ways to ensure failure, but no way to ensure success. Ultimately we're all at the mercy of other people to a degree, and that's the way it should be because we're all in it together. All we can do is make reasonable efforts to be the best versions of ourselves we can be, and accept that many things are beyond our control but we'll do our best anyway.
It matters when it comes to voting for policies. If you believe that luck is the predominant factor to becoming rich, then you'd likely support policies that redistribute wealth, and vice versa.
how about someone who went from $30k to only $40k. Winning the birth lottery to be smart enough to get the lucrative programming or dev job, is also luck.
Programming ability is not a "birth lottery". I'd bet if you looked at the average IQ at a no name company paying $70-80k to junior developers it would be surprisingly close to average. It definitely requires motivation and drive to pursue, much more than many other professions where you tick the knowledge box and just apply it all day.
I hate it when people blame the system for everything and deny themselves any personal responsibility for their own futures. There is a balance to be struck and people here jump far too quickly to assign all blame to the system.
People with average IQ can't learn algebra properly, I don't think you will find many such programmers. Even the median college student struggles with basic Algebra, the median person doesn't have much chance at all.
I don't think you can say that. A quick Google shows some random school district in Pittsburgh says pass rates by the end of 9th grade were around 60% [1] and this percentage only went up around 20% for the "Gifted" track students. You also see that Asians started scoring substantially higher than average in later years, which if you believe that all races have the same IQ distribution as I do, must mean that IQ doesn't matter that much for passing algebra.
Much more likely is that learning software engineering requires dedication and perseverance over a long period of time. If your code doesn't work or you don't understand the math, you get 0%, not 70% like you would in a history essay or English essay. You can't wing it. The average person doesn't give enough shits about school or learning to achieve any level of mastery. I strongly believe it's a motivational problem. Asian parents force their kids to achieve academic excellence which is why Asians are so overrepresented in software engineering and other STEM fields.
> Putting in the hard (and smart) work and persevering is all you can do.
I mostly agree. But if the problem is systematic ( slavery, indentured servitude, etc ), leaving or trying to change the system is probably better than putting in the hard/smart work and persevering. There are other options than just hard work and perseverance depending on the environment/situation.
> "Your résumé and work ethic are the best I've seen... but I went to college with the dude behind you. Better luck next time!"
I think the quip in the image is funny as a joke, but essentially disingenuous, as it doesn't think critically enough about most hiring cases and why someone would choose that
Of course, there are situations where people completely unfit for the job apply and get it due to connections, but that doesn't match the majority in hiring.
Usually you might find yourself comparing a person who looks stellar on paper and in the interview process—which, by the way, based on the number of articles on Hacker News about how bad the tech interviewing process is, isn't a great indicator either—versus a person who you might already have familiarity with and have a history of working together, and seems decent for the role, just not perfect. When doing hiring for a role, BigN companies always talk about how costly it is for false positives, so they might be willing to take someone whose actual job skills have been vetted to an extent
A lot of hiring people would choose decent familiarity over seemingly-great unfamiliarity
> In the comic, "college classmate" is lucky to have known the hiring manager.
Well, it also kind of demonstrates the contra-point: The classmate did go to college and use his time there to meet people and form connections. It was still luck he knew the manager (though he might've simply seeked out his connections), but it was definitely possible for him to increase his chances and/or pay off an earlier investment.
But connections are still orthogonal to skill in the job—unless the job is literally all about making and using connections that will help your company.
And believing that college is a place you go to make connections is a mark of being born to privilege. The nominal and most fundamental purpose of college is to get an education: either to improve yourself generally, or to gain skills that you can actually use performing a job. Thus, even between two people who went to college, it is extremely likely that someone who went "to meet people and form connections" was lucky enough that they were born into a privileged family.
I really fail to see the point of such articles. Sure luck plays a part, everyone is aware of this. As does who you know. And where you born. And how good looking you are. And a myriad of other factors outside your control.
But you can only effect the things you control. Perhaps a bit trite, but none the less, it's true. And if you can't control it, then well... you can't control it. It would be better, IMO, to focus on improving in the areas you do control rather than dwelling on the things you can't. Work hard, exercise, try to meet people, try to be aware of opportunities, etc., etc.
Hard work != smart work. Given a group of people with a common field of expertise, some of them will seem to be more efficient and naturally better decision makers than the average expert in the group. In some cases this may be fluff, but still believable enough to climb the corporate ladder.
In order to achieve certain goals, nurture may be as important as nature. An engineer in a rich country doesn't have to be especially brilliant to outperform a brilliant engineer who lives in a developing country in terms of wealth and quality of life. If you are experienced and have decent social skills, you can move to a less developed country and "reach the top" with relative ease. The top will of course be lower than in your country, but it will still be the top for the local observer.
Luck for sure is the biggest factor I think. Also one must really want to get to that top. Me: lucky or not I do more or less ok. Not rich but I am my own boss I live my life as I please and do not give much hoot about what is going on around. And that's is what I want.
I'll offer my perspective on this topic which tends to be pretty contentious and reaches deeply into people's worldview. To bolster my pedigree, I'll note that I immigrated to the west when I was a child and my family was relatively poor, and I find myself relatively successful now.
The first point I'll make is that success is a probability game. A person from a certain socioeconomic rung might "make it" through hard work, another by sheer serendipity, and yet another might grind their lives away in relative poverty. I prefer looking at this in terms of aggregate rates across cohorts. "What are the chances", given someone's circumstance, that talent and hard work lead to a relative degree of success greater than some other person.
On this question I do find that luck is the primary factor that stands out. But simply saying "luck" doesn't really reveal much. It's more worthwhile to understand the _nature_ of how luck interacts with the likelyhood of success.
The best analogy I've come up with this is that society and success and opportunity are a lottery where some people are able to obtain more tickets, and others fewer tickets. Each ticket represents an opportunity to fail and try again for success.
In this game, inherent talent and success may buy you 100 tickets, compared to someone else less talented who can only obtain 10 tickets. The 100 tickets does not guarantee success, but greatly increases the probability of it.
In that same vein, pre-existing wealth is able to buy you 10,000 tickets. Failure is not out of the question, your tickets might not pan out, but the probability of success is exponentially increased. Not only that, but one or more of those first 10k tickets paying out (in terms of success), leads to more wealth, and the ability to once again buy many more tickets.
Speaking for myself, many tickets were handed to me due to my circumstance. I immigrated under stable circumstances, not as a refugee or somebody fleeing violence and subject to stress. I had loving, caring parents that were educated enough to understand how to search and seek out opportunities that they could put in front of me when I was a child. Thus when I was 10 I found myself the owner of a Commodore 64 that my father obtained for me from a garage sale, for free, because the original owner no longer wanted it. Later on, my parents would scrimp and save to buy me a (then state of the art) 486 DX, 33-Mhz computer with 8 megabytes of ram. Some opportunities were disguised as disadvantages: social ostracization in school led me to spend most of my time indoors, on my computer, which never judged me. My isolation from physical socialization led me to seek out online communities online at a time when the world wide web was an academic curiosity.
I was afforded the opportunity of recovering from many failures because my parents built a support system around me, and encouraged and nurtured my talents through personal sacrifice. That's how I got my 100 tickets, and a few of them were lucky ones. And that led to some initial success, which allowed me to reinvest that success towards more tickets, which eventually snowballed to the point where I find myself living a kind of life that my parents could have never imagined for me when we first left our ancestral home.
I know for a fact that there were many like me who did not get as many tickets as I did. Talents wasted. Kids who were bright, brighter and more motivated than me, who did not get as many tickets, or who did but whose tickets simply didn't pan out enough returns before they ran out entirely.
I feel that we as a society are supporting and encouraging an incredible amount of waste by not finding better ways to afford more people more opportunities to fail and recover - "more tickets".
It is one of the reasons I am highly supportive of social support programs, public health care, and other collective tools to improve social welfare. Those sorts of policies ...
Any successful person who does not acknowledge luck in their success is an asshole.
Any as-of-yet-unsuccessful person who doesn't acknowledge the value of hard work and focus on things they can control is guaranteed to never be successful.
IMHO its ego on both sides that drives people to debate the exact factor of luck in success; even if you could quantify that what is the point? We're all dealt different hands in life, the trick is to play to your strengths and be grateful for the success you achieve.
I used to think that putting in the hard work was everything. That's what my parents taught me. Now I see how significantly the systems in which we operate either allow hard working people to capture their value, versus having the value extracted from their hard work.
Recent examples I can think of are:
1) Thousands of extremely hardworking athletes at the top of their sport, in their prime, who have had their value captured by the NCAA, instead of by the athletes themselves.
2) Scientists who have worked hard to invent novel technology but who have been blocked by institutions from licensing the technology they invent or being supported to further that technology.
3) Entrepreneurs who work incredibly hard and have their time, energy, and money drained by patent trolls who use the legal system to extract value.
4) Business owners who have to compete in a marketplace with VC-backed companies that can operate at a loss for years until they monopolize the market.
I could go on, but I'm not surprised that people are questioning whether hard work is enough. In many cases it's not. It's hard work + the system in which you are operating + having the connections and resources to fight entities that will inevitably try to leach off of your hard work.
It's never. I can move my desk from the right corner to the left 14 hours a day, 7 days a week - I think you could call that working hard. Yet it would bring me a complaint from my neighbors, at best.
You always need to work hard for the right thing. Identifying that is a big part of where luck comes in.
Ironically, it is unbelievably damaging for individuals to believe that one needs a lot of luck, as this belief feels good, destroys resilience, and prevents one from recognizing and going after the (initially) modest opportunities that do show up.
Sure, you won’t be like Elon Musk, but you could be better than 90% of the population, since most people don’t want to try hard. Much more “fun” to believe that life is unfair, and therefore no action is required on one’s part.
If you're born into a family making below the median income, it is incredibly unlikely that you will end up making an income in the top 10%, no matter how hard you work. The systemic pressures to prevent socioeconomic mobility are such that you still need a massive amount of luck, whether that luck is in being born rich or in getting just the right opportunities at the right times to break free of poverty.
And painting this as just being about mindset is also an incredibly narrow (and privileged) view. The amount of energy and brainpower that the stresses of being poor sap from you is just staggering.
Being interested in show business at a young age teaches you pretty easily that merit only accounts for so much.
On a related note, does anyone know of non-profit orgs that aim to teach people how to use their time and money wisely? Unfortunately there are plenty out there who, either through ignorance or lack of willpower, do not use either wisely, and there are plenty of people and companies happy to take advantage of them.
It’s incredibly telling that a whole bunch of commenters here, when confronted with the plain evidence that hard work doesn’t work, immediately retreat to the Noble Lie theory: ok, it doesn’t work, but it’s better if people think it does. Cui bono?
What is the "top"? "Top" is where you live off capital gains, meaning - in the broadest sense, someone else is working for you all the time. That's not something I'd aspire to. That's just plain lazy.
In some way, the "hard working elite" is the "laziest class" at the same time.
I do not wish for some utopian work world - I'd only wish we would not expect from others what we would not want for ourselves. And if the rich would never work for someone else, I'd be happy if they would not expect anyone to work for them.
Tangential to the balance of luck and work needed for success, whether genetics/... counts as luck or "self-" in self-made, etc.
1) Belief in luck and futility of hard work is a useless, in fact harmful belief. I can say this from personal experience of changing beliefs based on nothing more than buying into American self-help gospel for a short time. Even though in Russia, it was/is probably more likely for a rich person to be a crook, believing that hard work is therefore useless is one certain way to go nowhere. I'm happy I was actually deluded the other way ("it's only hard work") for a short time; it paid off immensely.
2) Overall (related), the developing "resentment zeitgeist" around this reminds me of the Soviet joke where the devil is giving a new hire a tour of hell. First, they come upon a pit of fire with bunch of people in it, and a burly demon nearby. "These are Americans", says the devil, "every once in a while one would try to escape; the demon would then shove him back in"... then they come upon a similar pit, with a whole squad of demons "these are [let's say] Swedes; when one of them tries to get out, all the others would try to help him, so we need a whole squad here" ... finally they come upon a pit with a frail, elderly demon napping on a chair nearby. "What about this one?" asks the new guy. "Oh, these are Soviets. Every once in a while, one of them would try to get out, but then the others would just drag him back in."
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadNo, but it might lead to it. You might see the CEO getting a million a year, but you don't see him financing his company from his hard-saved own money, possibly risking everything he has, and putting in 12 hour days for years to not go under. You only hear of his paycheck at the end of the month. Throwing your towel because you think his current work is worthless does not do you any good.
Now, sure, there are lazy CEOs who inherited the company or got lucky otherwise. It's not fair to some extent. But simply defaulting to doing nothing does not help you get anywhere, either - you're just hurting yourself.
So, if you think someone is getting more than you, you should really check whether the is a non-obvious reason they're getting more and whether the doing nothing in spite really brings you forward.
A lot of rewarding jobs open to everyone are really hard and it's fair game to say you don't care that much about success, playing games is fine. But just complaining because "they have more and I want it too" is laziness (pointing out actual inequality and proposing solutions, on the other hand, is not).
The only way to halt that is by experiencing something out of your control: bad parenting & trauma, burn-out, depression, ADHD. If someone wants to fix their "laziness" they gotta get help for those.
I think at this point luck gets far more of a focus than it deserves. It's become a thought-terminating cliche around the entire idea of why people succeed or fail.
Almost no one disputes that luck is a component of people making their fortunes, its caked into the word. (Fortuna, the goddess of luck, gives the word its first definition, the second definition as a large amount of money came later).
There's no 'most importantly' about immense success. No one is an Olympic medalist by accident. No one found their way to the moon by accident. And while luck was involved, no one became an oil tycoon by or started an ISP or laid underseas cables by tripping into it.
Ultimately I think "work hard" is generally good advice to be "good enough" or "above average", but actual success in the scale that you're describing definitely comes down to luck, because everyone in contention is working extremely hard.
In business, you can open a restaurant and be just as successful (or as unsuccessful) as your counterpart on a different street, or even right next door. There is no first and second place medalist in that scenario.
Life is not a competition unless you choose to make it one. There can be only one President at a time; only one gold medalist at a time in any event, but there can be many Elon Musks or Kanye Wests. Ultra-performing people work hard to get to the top, and then the same habits that put them there expand their "lead", but Elon Musk isn't in direct competition with anyone else at being the best Elon Musk he can be.
Wanting to work at FAANG is basically the olympics of IT, and people still try to do it all the time.
Not really, just football and lacrosse. On the other hand, there're many Olympic events that are not a part of the NCAA.
>Also, because spots in the Olympics are limited, the "best" person isn't always chosen to represent a given country for a given sport.
I don't think this is particularly important on average. I'm just giving a quick and dirty lower bound here to put things into perspective.
...how? "This person did nothing wrong and still did not make it to the olympics". That's literally what we're debating?
If you scroll up you'll find this discussion is about luck vs. hard work. I'll be stepping out of this specific comment thread now though. Enjoy your night.
Two people that are extremely talented interviewed for a position in which there is only 1 opening. One is selected, one isn't. Is this not a competition? Did the person that wasn't selected work less hard?
Working hard puts you in contention for lots of extremely competitive things in life. Often times, luck is the thing that decides which of the extremely talented, hard working individuals succeed and at what scale.
Most likely they did minimal errors or had slightly unfortunate conditions; when it comes down to fractions of a second, minimal performance differences most likely don't matter to much.
But all of these people still were at the Olympics. And you bet everyone making it there worked their ass off to get there. Going back to the Fortunes, this might be the equivalent of the "unlucky" exit at a few hundred million, instead of making it to the billions. Which is actually a nice parallel: You might need a bit of luck, but you also need the work.
Not all of "luck" is in the moment, is my point. Some of the luck is where you're born, who your family is, what seemingly inconsequential decisions you make.
> no one became an oil tycoon by or started an ISP or laid underseas cables by tripping into it.
Lots of people worked extremely hard and were competing with said-Tycoon, but didn't become an Oil Tycoon. This is luck.
Environment is not
What specifically is your question?
If anything, avoiding work by working hard to find ways to automate things and make them less work is what brings more success rather than just putting in 14 hours digging a ditch or hammering in railroad spikes.
Now in pop culture i think hard work is doing the necessary dirty work that pays off in the future. Working a job and taking that money and plowing it into something that will deliver more money for less work. Working hard at a bakery, taking those earnings to start something else that provides returns on other people’s work like a salon owner renting out salon space after years of pouring work into developing a brand or whatever.
I don't think data support this. Talent efficacy is more of a power law distribution than a sigmoid. Simone Biles is not a very marginally better gymnast. Elon Musk is not a modestly more enthusiastic car company CEO. Michael Phelps was not slightly better at swimming.
The differences between the best and the almost-best at extremely high levels of skill is much larger than the differences between modestly talented individuals.
Biles, Musk, and Phelps are in the top 1% of their professions. They stand out a lot.
The folks in the top 10% are often way more comparable and differences between them are negligible. It takes something special/extra to stand out in this crowd, and for many of them, it's not about working any harder to make it to the top 1%.
It takes a lot of luck/opportunity, and extraordinary natural talent to become part of this 1% group. Which is why their success is not easy to replicate. And it can come from anywhere. None of these people had parents or families in the top 10% of the same profession.
Curious. What was this time and place.
First - if you want to raise money today in silicon valley - the place is flooded with money.
Second - elon's not (that) famous for paypal or his other earlier companies - he's famous for tesla and spacex. Even as a rich person he put a huge amount of money into them relative to net worth.
Third - he did this and took on two entranched systems. In space he took on the existing govt backed space launch system type industry. These were players with BILLIONs of annual costs for very little return (SLS will be $20B to develop and $2B+ per launch). He's offering launches in $50M - $100M range by comparison. Etc etc. 100+ launches so far (SLS has zero even though govt spent many billions on it).
For cars - he had to build his entire car charging network, fight dealers and their govt cronies, fight oil, all while govt / politicians were spending billions again on this hydrogen superhighway nonsense.
You need to look at what govt is paying for existing defense / industrial launches. What they spend on development. Asia / Russia / Europe and US.
Atlas the govt paid $15B+ to develop and then 200M+ per launch.
Most other programs have been govt funded / cost+ contracts. SLS fits this.
Can you give me a specific example of the "billions" spaceX has gotten in "corporate welfare"? They are providing the deal of the century on development and ops costs, and are putting in far more private capital then most other providers as well, taking much more performance risk (ie, not all cost+ contracts) etc.
The idea that this approach is somehow more costly than the pure pork style of the past is a pretty bold claim.
There's really no detailed notes on any SpaceX subsidies.
The article talkes about $1.3B Nevada provided Tesla for a battery factory in Nevada. Digging a bit deeper, you find that these are mostly tax incentives commonly used by all auto mfgs and these are not actually cash payments.
Again, tesla is not unique in getting support from the govt (and likely has received relatively little over its lifetime compared to others).
From 2012
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-ba...
From 2008:
$80B bailout (not tax incentives - cash).
Ridiculous FIFO inventory valuation methods allowed for tax purposes. etc.
The actual incentives here are things like 10 year waiver of property taxes. That's not super uncommon if you built out somewhere that is less developed, which gigafactory nevada did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Nevada#/media/File:Tesla_...
Usually corp does have to pay some user fees and covers much more onsite stuff than you would see in an urban area for example (ie, Tesla would generally need to run onsite fire protection management vs Nevada building a fire station next to factory).
The idea is that after 10 years you've helped build a manufacturing base, the land and area is (much) more valuable, and long run your tax base in significantly increased. But since nothing much is there to start with you don't charge someone that much to develop it (you may even pay them in some cases though nevada may not have).
Note that businesses take this same approach with each other frequently. Intel wouldn't help Apple with chip for first iphone, Samsung (ARM) did. Was a good investment for ARM.
There's more to it than merely "wanting" to raise money. First, build a product, then market the product, get customers, get revenue, and then start pitching like crazy and hope that you get investment before your own savings or friends and family round money runs out.
If you're aware of a more straightforward or reliable path, I would love to hear about it.
> But I guess randos on the internet will always have a godly opinion of themselves...
I made no comment on myself. This is an ad hominem.
Sure, but let's not pretend that is unique. Our government subsidize many (most?) companies in Energy, Automotive, and Aerospace.
If you look at individual records he literally was just ~1% better than the previous record holder. His 200m freestyle record was 102.96, the previous record was 104.06. The whole field is people making slight improvements on previous generations.
> Elon Musk is not a modestly more enthusiastic car company CEO
Many attempts at electric cars were there, his happened to be at the time when battery tech had become good enough. A few decades earlier we'd look at him they same way we look at Clive Sinclair after his electric car effort, despite a previous notable contribution in the computer market.
According to wikipedia, his career best 200m short course freestyle time is 1:42.78 [0].
In contrast the cobsideration time for 2019-2020 high school boys 200m freestyle is 1:51.05 (I think this is the same event, but Phelp's short and long course time are close enough that the point holds even if there is a slight difference in the event definition).
In quantitative terms, the best swimmer humanity has to offer is about 7.4% better than a bunch of highschoolers.
In objective terms, both in absolute time and percentage improvement an increase at skill in swimming has a much larger effect on less skilled swimmers. And this result holds true for almost all skills.
Looking at world records, of the 39 world records he has set, 35 have been beaten by others. [0]
Sports like swimming are designed specifically to amplify marginal differences. That is why so much effort goes into accuratly timing them: the difference in their times is marginal.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps
[1] https://swimswam.com/nisca-releases-2019-20-all-america-time...
Luck and the family you were born into are two of the big things you can't change. Doesn't matter how much you acknowledge it, it won't change.
Putting in the hard (and smart) work and persevering is all you can do. It's a waste of time and energy to worry about Kylie Jenner calling herself a self-made billionaire or whether others are just "luckier" than you.
Disclaimer: I am probably a target audience of the article and maybe a bit biased. I was "lucky" many times in my life which allowed me to move from a family income of around $30k growing up, to around $400k solo now.
My only problem with those engaging in such behavior comes from the subset of them who have much more privilege than vast majority of Americans - like say upper middle class and wealthy minorities. They often tilt the system even more in their favor over other poor, struggling Americans of whatever color or creed.
Many highly educated, wealthy female Brahmin Indian-Americans (2nd+ gen) are particularly adept at manipulating the system in this way to benefit them as "POCs" who grew up in exclusive neighborhoods with wealthy parents, and end up at Ivies. And yet constantly leverage their "oppression".
"Those who can do..." is similar. It's catchy, and because it's catchy people are more likely to believe it, particularly those who are fortunate enough to enjoy the survivorship bias of success. But like Cochran's slogan, it is not true.
But proof-by-aphorism is hard to counter with actual logic. I mean, look at the argument I am presenting right now. Don't you think it's starting to get a little tedious? Do you not find yourself tempted to tune out? Don't you think a lot of people probably already have?
The sad fact of the matter is that the most effective counter to proof-by-aphorism is often another aphorism. If the counter-aphorism is not entirely true, well, that is just part of the point. And the other sad fact of the matter is that many people achieve success not by "doing" but by gaming the system. Not all, but a lot. So I think it's very disingenuous of anyone to get up on a high horse about less successful people trying to similarly tilt the odds in their favor.
E.g. guaranteed levels of healthcare, education, and shelter.
I know I do it, I live in such a country and choose to live on much less than the least paid workers gets. I don't need more, and the low spending lets me work almost nothing and still get by. I don't feel I lack anything, and neither do any of the poor people I see here. College was free, healthcare is free, entertainment is super cheap with free public parks with sports areas and cheap internet, transportation is cheap with public transit and most stuff you need is within walking distance anyway.
If instead I was an American citizen I'd work a lot harder to avoid all the shit that can happen to you when you lack money there. I'd be richer on paper, but in practice I think I'd be worse off.
Most of us are lucky to be around now instead of 100 (or 1000) years ago.
For some reason people like to ignore temporal luck and temporal inequality, but for actual human outcomes they are massive influences.
For example, reduce regulation, improve education, enforce anti-trust laws (which I see as a different thing than general regulation that is regressive toward small business), increase access to capital, reduce legal and administrative costs of business, etc. Reduce the influence of crony capitalism.
It is the connotation among the wealthy that people in poverty aren't working hard enough. It creates an environment where the job creators create jobs with nowhere to go, all the while toting this idea that they create huge opportunity for others.
When it isn't true, it causes damage.
I recall a woman who owned a hair salon who asked Bernie Sanders about providing health insurance to her workers. Her point was that she is about to grow her business, but if laws are passed that force her to provide insurance for her employees she won't be able to expand.
Bernie let her off easy, but if she had asked me I would have told her that her business obviously isn't providing the kind of value to society that it needs to in order to grow larger. What's the point? To enslave more people that you never intend to provide a living wage too? If you go out of businesses maybe a salon will open that can afford to provide a decent wage to the same employees you take for granted.
Insurance, sure. That's just another part of comp that you can provide. It's not as straight forward as just money, but it's certainly much easier than training employees for jobs you don't offer.
If someone believes you can be "self-made" without also necessarily also having a substantial amount of luck, that someone can't explain the gap between success and mere subsistence as anything but "lack of determination", often with a moralistic tone.
The very successful shape our society with their influence, which they wield in advancement of their beliefs. If those beliefs are incomplete, or lack empathy, it affects all of us.
Even if they were wrong and "they would have made it anyways" devaluing someone's effort like what I see happening these days (and moreover, socially pressured to shut up about it) is not a sustainable strategy for ameliorating social disparity.
Now imagine the monkey who spent 10 units of energy sitting on Ellen's couch telling the world about how hard he pulled on those bootstraps.
Edit: Fixed a typo.
I'm sorry. I am actually a former scientist, and I pulled hundred hour workweeks in the lab. You do not know what that word means.
Moreover, you completely missed the point.
This seems like a failure of imagination to me.
Having adequate food and shelter is a long way from being able to start a profitable business, and it can even be the case that as society becomes more prosperous it becomes HARDER to start a business. Example: try starting a restaurant with the regulations today vs 1950.
It's not enough to look at where someone is, you have to look at where someone started. If you are a millionaire and your dad was a billionaire, you are probably one of the biggest losers on the planet.
Being raised rich taught you that wealth isn't everything, in fact it can be quite toxic and maddening.
So you end up owning a house and some retirement investments after 40 years, but most of all feel proud of the work you've done and the lives you've bettered.
To be called the biggest loser in the world seems like a stretch.
You could instead focus on some sort of personal goal, but if you are actually doing that you won't care how much money someone else has.
Luckily you were not that shallow or self-deceived and realized that living a humble life and taking the time to work with your students one-on-one was true value you could provide.
Unlike your father, you will leave this world having given more than you took. You will have truly empowered the children to work for a better world than the one they were born into.
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Fwiw, I don't believe in being self-made because everyone's idea of "a ton of bullshit" is different.
I feel like by American standards I'm "self-made". I taught myself how to program as a kid and made a career for myself that pays extremely well (I work at a "FAANG-adjacent" company, equitable pay).
My parents didn't co sign any loans, I didn't even go to college. No connections ever involved in getting a job, no friends of parents for summer jobs or anything. Just mind numbing famounts of hours spent single mindedly working on things from childhood to adulthood. Struggling to teach myself, struggling against everyone telling my I was wasting my time (in their defense, I almost didn't graduate high school over how focused I was on projects that ultimately didn't become anything), sacrificing a lot of what most people experience growing up because I was convinced this was what mattered.
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But then you have my parents. My dad grew up with a father who was a non-functioning alcoholic in a 3rd world country. He'd farm for yams to get a few cents to pay for school uniforms. He'd walk a mile out to his friend's house in the middle of the night to be able to read by a lantern because they didn't have one.
My mother's father died and a young age and she had to grow up with relatives who didn't hide their disdain for her. As I've grown older I've realized she downplays how bad her situation was growing up, but in the end she wanted to continue education and they forced her to be a seamstress, so she taught herself to type (in the days of typewriters not computers) and joined the police as a secretary in her country.
Today my dad has a PhD and my mother has her doctorate. Compared to them I might as well have been handed the world in a silver platter for the simple reason, at least I had time. I wasn't struggling to find food, I wasn't cleaning up after my father after he soiled himself in a drunken stupor. My parents might not have agreed with what I was doing, and it might have brought conflict between us, but they didn't hate me.
Of course if you look around you'll find someone who would make their story look like they got a silver platter. After all, at the very least in their poverty they still had peace. They weren't dodging bullets, they weren't in a war-torn country or something.
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That's why I have no problem with social pressure telling "modestly privileged, or even hugely privileged" people to shut up about how absolutely terrible the odds were and how they struggled. Everything is relative.
Put a prince who's never lifted a finger to even wash his face in an upper middle class life and he'll cry real tears struggling to figure out how a 9-5 works.
There's nothing wrong with giving him a shoulder to cry on, but there's nothing useful or teachable about his struggle (except maybe driving home the how deep his privilege was...) I'd much rather hear from what it took people with much less to get to where they are. There's often more to learn there.
Look at this block of text that you wrote. It's almost entirely all about yourself. You weren't listening at ALL to what my claim is.
Suppose you're middle class, and you haul ass to get ahead. You're not born into abject poverty or anything, but you really DID need to work hard. And some asshole, who probably hasn't worked nearly as hard as you, comes around and tells you "well, you made it because you're white, male, or tall" or whatever (I, personally am only one of those things). AND you can't complain about the metanarrative, because you'll get cancelled, or whatever.
This is not a "prince who's never lifted a finger". This is someone who had to struggle.
Woeeee is you, you struggled sooooooo hard and now some random person tells you that you only made it because X and that will somehow social disparity... because?
What, you're going to be extra mean to people who aren't in your social strata or something now? Like us vs them or something?
I mean, you realize:
Suppose you're middle class, and you haul ass to get ahead. You're not born into abject poverty or anything, but you really DID need to work hard. And some asshole, who probably hasn't worked nearly as hard as you, comes around and tells you "well, you made it because you're white, male, or tall" or whatever (I, personally am only one of those things).
Thats... that's me. Literally word for word. Down to "one of those things". Or did you... not realize most of the comment is not about me?
Someone tells me that I only made it because I'm male and I won't even give them the time of day! How often is this happening to you that you're crying about it?!
And if I was forced to reply, it's so easy to say the absolute truth: being male didn't hurt! Like holy shit, I struggled and sacrificed but being male never hurt!
Maybe that's what's really hurting you? The fact that despite struggling, there's some property of your path that was out of your control but made the path easier? Yup that's how it is.
No one is 100% self-made. Being cognizant of that helps you be a better person.
You can increase your odds by getting certain kinds of degrees and by living in certain areas, but odds are still going to be against you. I’m not sure how much since I don’t have the conditional probabilities at hand.
Try to get your hands on the stats to set your expectations accordingly. Good luck out there!
"Being born smart is luck"
Depends on how you view it, we normally say luck are things that doesn't affect merit. "You were lucky to be born being able to do stuff others can't", well sure but that is how society should work, a person who provides more value should naturally get more of the rewards. Otherwise you'd have to say things like "Einstein discovered all the things he did almost solely thanks to luck!".
It’s okay to be an average income earner, most are. Don’t get too hung up on something that isn’t likely for you.
Also don’t forget what is valued can change. A farmer might be very lucky and valued, by a chance turn of events. If your doing well, be kind and try to raise the floor up for lesser income earners. Maybe they’ll remember you well if you have a turn of bad luck.
It's a fairly recent phenomena that Google began hiring from most universities at the college level, in 2010 they didn't even perform campus recruiting at all of the top-40 universities let alone dedicate valuable phone screen and interview time to candidates outside of top university programs with high GPAs.
Hell this is the company founded by Stanford PHDs that famously required industry hires to furnish proof that they held a GPA higher than 3.5!
I've tried to increase my "luck" by forcing myself to do things that have an asymmetric payoff: meeting new people, writing blog posts, saying yes to things, etc
It's worked pretty well so far!
Doing what you need to do and not what is easy pays huge dividends.
Combining your grit and smarts with their luck (family money, connections, whatever) may take you both to the next level.
The peasant doesn’t think they’ll become a lord by working harder.
Same thing with dating. There are no magic words or social skills to ensure that the person someone likes, will like them back. There are lots of ways to ensure failure, but no way to ensure success. Ultimately we're all at the mercy of other people to a degree, and that's the way it should be because we're all in it together. All we can do is make reasonable efforts to be the best versions of ourselves we can be, and accept that many things are beyond our control but we'll do our best anyway.
how about someone who went from $30k to only $40k. Winning the birth lottery to be smart enough to get the lucrative programming or dev job, is also luck.
I literally said I was lucky in that same sentence. Come on now...
I hate it when people blame the system for everything and deny themselves any personal responsibility for their own futures. There is a balance to be struck and people here jump far too quickly to assign all blame to the system.
Much more likely is that learning software engineering requires dedication and perseverance over a long period of time. If your code doesn't work or you don't understand the math, you get 0%, not 70% like you would in a history essay or English essay. You can't wing it. The average person doesn't give enough shits about school or learning to achieve any level of mastery. I strongly believe it's a motivational problem. Asian parents force their kids to achieve academic excellence which is why Asians are so overrepresented in software engineering and other STEM fields.
[1]: https://www.pghschools.org/Page/5073
I mostly agree. But if the problem is systematic ( slavery, indentured servitude, etc ), leaving or trying to change the system is probably better than putting in the hard/smart work and persevering. There are other options than just hard work and perseverance depending on the environment/situation.
An irrational belief in merit and your own hard work likely helps one succeed.
I think the quip in the image is funny as a joke, but essentially disingenuous, as it doesn't think critically enough about most hiring cases and why someone would choose that
Of course, there are situations where people completely unfit for the job apply and get it due to connections, but that doesn't match the majority in hiring.
Usually you might find yourself comparing a person who looks stellar on paper and in the interview process—which, by the way, based on the number of articles on Hacker News about how bad the tech interviewing process is, isn't a great indicator either—versus a person who you might already have familiarity with and have a history of working together, and seems decent for the role, just not perfect. When doing hiring for a role, BigN companies always talk about how costly it is for false positives, so they might be willing to take someone whose actual job skills have been vetted to an extent
A lot of hiring people would choose decent familiarity over seemingly-great unfamiliarity
Luck isn't necessarily bad or evil, as you point out in this case hiring someone you know is just smart; but it's still just luck.
Height bias, racial bias, gender bias, are all bad reasons to get lucky.
Well, it also kind of demonstrates the contra-point: The classmate did go to college and use his time there to meet people and form connections. It was still luck he knew the manager (though he might've simply seeked out his connections), but it was definitely possible for him to increase his chances and/or pay off an earlier investment.
And believing that college is a place you go to make connections is a mark of being born to privilege. The nominal and most fundamental purpose of college is to get an education: either to improve yourself generally, or to gain skills that you can actually use performing a job. Thus, even between two people who went to college, it is extremely likely that someone who went "to meet people and form connections" was lucky enough that they were born into a privileged family.
But you can only effect the things you control. Perhaps a bit trite, but none the less, it's true. And if you can't control it, then well... you can't control it. It would be better, IMO, to focus on improving in the areas you do control rather than dwelling on the things you can't. Work hard, exercise, try to meet people, try to be aware of opportunities, etc., etc.
Hard work != smart work. Given a group of people with a common field of expertise, some of them will seem to be more efficient and naturally better decision makers than the average expert in the group. In some cases this may be fluff, but still believable enough to climb the corporate ladder.
In order to achieve certain goals, nurture may be as important as nature. An engineer in a rich country doesn't have to be especially brilliant to outperform a brilliant engineer who lives in a developing country in terms of wealth and quality of life. If you are experienced and have decent social skills, you can move to a less developed country and "reach the top" with relative ease. The top will of course be lower than in your country, but it will still be the top for the local observer.
The first point I'll make is that success is a probability game. A person from a certain socioeconomic rung might "make it" through hard work, another by sheer serendipity, and yet another might grind their lives away in relative poverty. I prefer looking at this in terms of aggregate rates across cohorts. "What are the chances", given someone's circumstance, that talent and hard work lead to a relative degree of success greater than some other person.
On this question I do find that luck is the primary factor that stands out. But simply saying "luck" doesn't really reveal much. It's more worthwhile to understand the _nature_ of how luck interacts with the likelyhood of success.
The best analogy I've come up with this is that society and success and opportunity are a lottery where some people are able to obtain more tickets, and others fewer tickets. Each ticket represents an opportunity to fail and try again for success.
In this game, inherent talent and success may buy you 100 tickets, compared to someone else less talented who can only obtain 10 tickets. The 100 tickets does not guarantee success, but greatly increases the probability of it.
In that same vein, pre-existing wealth is able to buy you 10,000 tickets. Failure is not out of the question, your tickets might not pan out, but the probability of success is exponentially increased. Not only that, but one or more of those first 10k tickets paying out (in terms of success), leads to more wealth, and the ability to once again buy many more tickets.
Speaking for myself, many tickets were handed to me due to my circumstance. I immigrated under stable circumstances, not as a refugee or somebody fleeing violence and subject to stress. I had loving, caring parents that were educated enough to understand how to search and seek out opportunities that they could put in front of me when I was a child. Thus when I was 10 I found myself the owner of a Commodore 64 that my father obtained for me from a garage sale, for free, because the original owner no longer wanted it. Later on, my parents would scrimp and save to buy me a (then state of the art) 486 DX, 33-Mhz computer with 8 megabytes of ram. Some opportunities were disguised as disadvantages: social ostracization in school led me to spend most of my time indoors, on my computer, which never judged me. My isolation from physical socialization led me to seek out online communities online at a time when the world wide web was an academic curiosity.
I was afforded the opportunity of recovering from many failures because my parents built a support system around me, and encouraged and nurtured my talents through personal sacrifice. That's how I got my 100 tickets, and a few of them were lucky ones. And that led to some initial success, which allowed me to reinvest that success towards more tickets, which eventually snowballed to the point where I find myself living a kind of life that my parents could have never imagined for me when we first left our ancestral home.
I know for a fact that there were many like me who did not get as many tickets as I did. Talents wasted. Kids who were bright, brighter and more motivated than me, who did not get as many tickets, or who did but whose tickets simply didn't pan out enough returns before they ran out entirely.
I feel that we as a society are supporting and encouraging an incredible amount of waste by not finding better ways to afford more people more opportunities to fail and recover - "more tickets".
It is one of the reasons I am highly supportive of social support programs, public health care, and other collective tools to improve social welfare. Those sorts of policies ...
Any as-of-yet-unsuccessful person who doesn't acknowledge the value of hard work and focus on things they can control is guaranteed to never be successful.
IMHO its ego on both sides that drives people to debate the exact factor of luck in success; even if you could quantify that what is the point? We're all dealt different hands in life, the trick is to play to your strengths and be grateful for the success you achieve.
Recent examples I can think of are:
1) Thousands of extremely hardworking athletes at the top of their sport, in their prime, who have had their value captured by the NCAA, instead of by the athletes themselves.
2) Scientists who have worked hard to invent novel technology but who have been blocked by institutions from licensing the technology they invent or being supported to further that technology.
3) Entrepreneurs who work incredibly hard and have their time, energy, and money drained by patent trolls who use the legal system to extract value.
4) Business owners who have to compete in a marketplace with VC-backed companies that can operate at a loss for years until they monopolize the market.
I could go on, but I'm not surprised that people are questioning whether hard work is enough. In many cases it's not. It's hard work + the system in which you are operating + having the connections and resources to fight entities that will inevitably try to leach off of your hard work.
It's never. I can move my desk from the right corner to the left 14 hours a day, 7 days a week - I think you could call that working hard. Yet it would bring me a complaint from my neighbors, at best.
You always need to work hard for the right thing. Identifying that is a big part of where luck comes in.
Sure, you won’t be like Elon Musk, but you could be better than 90% of the population, since most people don’t want to try hard. Much more “fun” to believe that life is unfair, and therefore no action is required on one’s part.
And painting this as just being about mindset is also an incredibly narrow (and privileged) view. The amount of energy and brainpower that the stresses of being poor sap from you is just staggering.
Rather it's usually 'necessary' and a pretty good qualifier in most ways.
Finally, who on earth said 'the top' was an aspiration for most people? Or even noble?
If you 'work hard' consistently, you'll probably be 'ok' and if you apply a little big of grit and consistency, you'll do 'alright'.
The 'apex' is whole other thing entirely.
On a related note, does anyone know of non-profit orgs that aim to teach people how to use their time and money wisely? Unfortunately there are plenty out there who, either through ignorance or lack of willpower, do not use either wisely, and there are plenty of people and companies happy to take advantage of them.
In some way, the "hard working elite" is the "laziest class" at the same time.
I do not wish for some utopian work world - I'd only wish we would not expect from others what we would not want for ourselves. And if the rich would never work for someone else, I'd be happy if they would not expect anyone to work for them.
1) Belief in luck and futility of hard work is a useless, in fact harmful belief. I can say this from personal experience of changing beliefs based on nothing more than buying into American self-help gospel for a short time. Even though in Russia, it was/is probably more likely for a rich person to be a crook, believing that hard work is therefore useless is one certain way to go nowhere. I'm happy I was actually deluded the other way ("it's only hard work") for a short time; it paid off immensely.
2) Overall (related), the developing "resentment zeitgeist" around this reminds me of the Soviet joke where the devil is giving a new hire a tour of hell. First, they come upon a pit of fire with bunch of people in it, and a burly demon nearby. "These are Americans", says the devil, "every once in a while one would try to escape; the demon would then shove him back in"... then they come upon a similar pit, with a whole squad of demons "these are [let's say] Swedes; when one of them tries to get out, all the others would try to help him, so we need a whole squad here" ... finally they come upon a pit with a frail, elderly demon napping on a chair nearby. "What about this one?" asks the new guy. "Oh, these are Soviets. Every once in a while, one of them would try to get out, but then the others would just drag him back in."