The FAANGs have always been environments where peers are significantly more in competition against each other than in ordinary employers, particularly for those in their early career where "either up or out" is the rule. It's undoubtedly much more vicious now that tech companies are actively laying off those seen as low performers. Making sure you get credit for what you've done, as long as it's not overdone, is a su…
Yeah, I was watching an interview with left-wing economist Robert Reich who dismissed that a lot of working class and minority people liked Trump because they harbor their own ambitions of social mobility. Reich said that was all bullshit and there was no social mobility, but that's the attitude of a professor who got his start when it was a lot easier to break into academia -- since then he's seen many many people e…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Reich
>In 2000, Reich dropped out of Buckingham Browne & Nichols School as a result of clinical depression and in order to pursue acting.
I'd say getting a STEM PhD has different mobility defects than being black/italian & being Jewish compensates for those (as in, one is conditioned to pass on valuable stuff to your kids that aren't always backed by hard assets or knowledge)
As another (negative) example, Ben Shapiro probably didn't get the skills required to deconstruct his forebear's world-models but he got the leg up in terms of getting his mediocre ideas heard (albeit he has actionable insights about meaning vs motivation that got drowned out in the "nepotic noise")