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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

The article feels like a variation of survivor bias to me. I think his friend was right and the author got ‘lucky’ to land a role in a successful company. He could easily have landed in another toxic or stale company.

Alternatively, you could probably find another story about an engineer who left a similar situation and founded a unicorn company, so in comparison, would this author have ‘failed’ because he didn’t go down that road?

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I don't agree. If anything, this seems to be a sampling bias- people who don't move on from situations they can't actively change will be sampled as relatively unsuccessful compared to those who will.

In other words: If author had moved to an unsuccessful team, he likely would have moved again until he found a team he could be successful with. Looking back and comparing with his friend who didn't move on will often result in a favorable comparison.

If we look at this from a buddhist's point of view, then there is no luck: the author did something in past that allowed him to use this opportunity and what he did could be completely unrelated to his work, e.g. he wrote a blogpost long time ago that he didn't consider important, but it really helped a few people.

Not agreeing or disagreeing, but one note: he didn't go to a different company, he went to a different division within Microsoft.

In a large enough organization, moving to a different team might as well be moving to a different company.

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