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Comment by YeezyMode | Hacker News Reader

It seems so unlikely to me that large swaths of people who act this way can make it to a place in any industry where they're surrounded by more resourceful peers. How does this even happen? I just want to make sure that I'm not creating a view out of reading exaggerated anecdotes, and that this actually reflects reality.

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College degrees or plain salespersonship conferring an inappropriate amount of merit. This is the unfortunate corrolary of impostor syndrome: some people really are impostors.

I think if we want to start pushing more people into trades and de-emphasize college education: (1) we make it much harder to graduate college and (2) make college much cheaper so that pursuing that risk isn't ruinous. Then a student can explore a college path and pivot to something more suited to their attitude and skills to remain a productive member of society if it doesn't work out.

Worth reading this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Combine that with the Pareto Principle and you start to get a fairly accurate picture of "why the world is the way it is." And this applies to all industries, not just tech.

If you look at it through a nihilist lens, it can bum you out quick. But, if you look at it like "I was given the gift/responsibility to do this well" (sans God-complex, elitist "useless eaters" attitude), it makes it a bit more fun/tolerable.

I've personally encountered this quite a bit circling around tech, in most of the cases I've seen it was due to _deeply seated_ insecurity more than anything else. Usually it corresponds with folks who find themselves in a position that they're a poor fit for but for whatever reason can't move on. They bounced into a position they can't exit and their 'value add' is applying this sort of tactic under the guise of being helpful externally.

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