When I try to compare myself with less educated/poorer people I realize my advantages can be singificantly if not mostly attributed to my upbringing. I was raised in an upper-middle class 2 parent household, belong to the majority ethnicity of my country, attended private school, had access to test prep, tutoring, extracurriculars, etc. I feel that I am certainly at the median or below among those with my preconditions.
Further, (and perhaps this was the subtextual point of my original post), there seems to be a sense of "getting it" among the intellectual elite, who seem to embody an attitude that 200k FAANG jobs right out of college are a no-brainer, that "failing" is merely being an L4 by 30, that getting into YC or some comparable measure, though obviously a huge feat for any normal person, is just a right of passage for those who who have the knack.
This "thing" that I am reffering to seems to be a presumed cultural mode permeating through the fog of cliquey tech-elite signaling on Twitter and elsewhere. Maybe it's a sort of fear of social exlusion towards those in groups I feel embody the intellectual status I've always envied. Maybe this is all a game of those on the better side of serendipity making it appear much easier than it was, or maybe there is something else I'm just not getting.
> When I try to compare myself with less educated/poorer people I realize my advantages can be significantly if not mostly attributed to my upbringing
Probably looks that way to the billionaire founders too. Gates, for example, happened to grow up when only a few kids had computers at home, and working with them was not that far separated from the hardware. He happened to live in a region that needed traffic control software, so he ran with that and succeeded. With one win under his belt, he and his small team were well positioned to parlay into PC software at a time when IBM was uniquely vulnerable. Had any of those variables been different, Chuck Robinson might have become the richest man in the world.
(Chuck, though fictitious, had a mundane career like 99.999% of SWEs that have ever lived)
Further, (and perhaps this was the subtextual point of my original post), there seems to be a sense of "getting it" among the intellectual elite, who seem to embody an attitude that 200k FAANG jobs right out of college are a no-brainer, that "failing" is merely being an L4 by 30, that getting into YC or some comparable measure, though obviously a huge feat for any normal person, is just a right of passage for those who who have the knack.
This "thing" that I am reffering to seems to be a presumed cultural mode permeating through the fog of cliquey tech-elite signaling on Twitter and elsewhere. Maybe it's a sort of fear of social exlusion towards those in groups I feel embody the intellectual status I've always envied. Maybe this is all a game of those on the better side of serendipity making it appear much easier than it was, or maybe there is something else I'm just not getting.