Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Often overlooked in the discussions about privilege and equality is the discussion about how citizens of different countries are given different levels of access to the same jobs.

Like, I’m a US citizen and have basic programming skills. Not long after college I landed a software engineering job and I immediately have access to markets like SF or NYC, all I have to do is pack up and move (and it turns out I don’t even have to pack up, because relocation packages include it).

Let’s say you’re from Syria and have a similar set of skills. This sounds hypothetical, but I’m thinking of a specific, real person here. You go to college in the middle east, eventually get a tech job doing operations work in the EU, get an intra-company transfer to the US, have to deal with US govt. questions to work in tech or get a bank account, and then eventually transfer to a software engineering job.

At the same point it makes complete sense that there are dense clusters of highly skilled software engineers in a few places, like SF, and if you want access to that talent pool you have to pay them enough money to make rent.

Forget Syria, Canada is a better example. Canadians earn a fraction of US salaries despite some expensive COL in Vancouver and Toronto.

In Vancouver, can confirm

There's also a skill gap here.

Pretty sure most SV-based devs would qualify to immigrate to Canada, but the opposite is far from true.

Out of control immigration quotas, an extremely lax oversight of what constitutes reasonable qualifications to get a Canadian GC and the government itself pitching the country as cheap offshoring [0] are all things Canadian devs should fix instead of whining about lower wages.

[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...

This comes down to a philosophical question: what would be the ideal way to give access to opportunities? Should only smart and hard working people people get them? Both of those things are in large part determined by genes. If you take this to the extreme we could give every child a gene and IQ test and determine based on that if they should live in a slum or in luxury.

I don’t think that there is a good answer.

> what would be the ideal way to give access to opportunities? Should only smart and hard working people people get them?

As opposed to just getting access by virtue of where you were lucky enough to be born or how wealthy your parents are?

But one could argue even intelligence is based purely on luck.

Actually the same is true of "hard work".

Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They exhibit a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; they display planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. It is manifested in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, and systematic; also including such elements as carefulness, thoroughness, and deliberation (the tendency to think carefully before acting)

[...]

With the advent of the FFM (Five-Factor Model), behavior geneticists began systematic studies of the full range of personality traits, and it soon became clear that all five factors are substantially heritable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness

IQ ≠ intelligence, and intelligence has only a fraction to do with genes.

Overly simplistic summary: Intelligence is how quickly you can learn, how well you learn it, and how well you retain it.

Learning skills has to do with meta-learning and how you're taught to learn. Liquid intelligence is a skill that can to a degree be taught. Retaining knowledge has quite a bit to do with how you learn it. Some people are gifted and remember everything by default, but for everyone else there is meta-learning.

Of course, I'm being overly simplistic, due to intelligence being a complex topic, but the point is, intelligence isn't all genes. If you want to increase your intelligence, you can make that a hobby.

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