Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

Coming from a similar background like the original poster, I agree with him.

And no I didn't run out of money while in college because I went on ski trips. I lived on student loan and credit card just to pay for food and not much else. My parents couldn't send me much money. And yes I worked to earn money while in college, which doesn't help with improving grade. And of course the peers with no money worry can pick and choose non-paying internships or go do something that adds to their resume.

Growing up poor (I mean poor) damages one's psyche that others just don't understand. The degree of severity may vary but combine teen years + seeing parent(s) struggle with money everyday, you have a recipe for a hurt in your heart that lasts your life time that others just don't understand. And this 'hurt' is more noticeable when you know your peers around you are not suffering same issue.

And no I don't advocate for a national program to eradicate poverty.

I just read the PG essay and have to agree with the parent post. From what I can see, his argument boils down to this: increasing wealth concentration is caused by many things. Some of these things are 'bad' (e.g. rent-seeking, bribing politicians) in and of themselves, and should be addressed. Some of these things are 'good' (e.g. economic productivity varies from person to person, all other things equal), and it would be ill-advised to do away with these things by blindly optimising towards 'less wealth inequality' (as it would make everyone worse off, in an absolute sense).

Obviously an oversimplification, as the essay also hints at a 'undetermined' category. On this, the essay touches on two issues I've been thinking about for the past 5 years:

1) As capital (i.e. the means of production) becomes increasingly digital, it becomes cheaper to acquire and production can occur at a marginal cost of near 0 (e.g. it costs facebook virtually nothing when a person makes a new account). Cheaper to acquire means fewer people needed to pool money to attain capital. And marginal cost near 0 means more 'winner-takes-all' markets (e.g. natural monopolies, network monopolies etc.). All this will result in more wealth concentrated in fewer hands.

2) Digital capital is highly mobile. AWS instances can be moved to another country almost instantaneously and without cost. This makes it hard for governments to tax returns to digital capital, barring some global tax agreement. So governments have very little scope for redistributing this increasingly concentrated wealth.

We badly need to have a public (and probably global) conversation along similar lines as PG's essay: do we consider these good or bad things? are we ok with the resulting society? what should we do (if anything) about this?

Instead the conversation seems to be dominated by people who are fixated on remedying the symptoms, rather than the underlying disease(s). Supremely frustrating, and will eventually result in more extreme policy outcomes (i.e. expropriation vs. free-for-all).

Off-topic, but I wanted to say that I really appreciate this comment/clarification - the matter-of-fact tone makes the point without getting anyone's back up, which (IMHO) is exactly the right way to reach hearts and minds.

I'm pretty bad about defaulting to masculine pronouns myself, and this simple exchange has done a lot to motivate me to break that habit (I would have also assumed your gender to be male, and would not have really thought about that assumption if not for this comment). Conversely, I think that would have just glazed over an angry/offended response, since I think it's clear that the person you're replying to meant no offense. So, thanks!

More on-topic (in response to your GP comment): I have a pretty similar family background, and have also experienced a lot of self-doubt. I think a lot of us (people in tech) suffer from impostor syndrome at times; the approach that helped me to overcome it is "fake it 'til you make it", especially in your internal dialogue. Try your best to project confidence in your abilities, and (more importantly) squash that little voice in your head that says you're not good enough whenever you hear it - even if you're inclined to agree with it.

I know this is easier said than done, but I think that it really helps improve the situation. For example, say you disagree with something said in a meeting:

: "Keep your mouth shut, you're just going to look stupid!"

: "No! I may not know everything about this subject, but I know a lot, and they haven't considered X!"

: "I'm not an expert on this topic, but it seems to me that we might be overlooking X......Does that make sense, or am I missing something?"

As long as you're careful not to come off as hostile (note that the "out-loud" part has a deliberately humble tone and invites further discussion if others disagree), the worst-case scenario is you get some free education from someone more experienced than you; best-case, you get some immediate, external validation that you do know what you're doing. In either case, you're working towards breaking the habit of self doubt.

Anecdotally, I helped a friend get his first job in tech a couple of years back (he was previously a trash hauler), working as my assistant (I'm a DevOp) because I knew he'd be great at it if given the chance. His impostor syndrome caused him to totally choke in the final interview (upper management actively didn't want to hire him, but I managed to convince them that he'd be worth the low salary he was willing to take). It took him over a year to begin to believe that he wasn't an impostor, rather just new to the field. He worked hard, and followed my advice above, and his confidence gradually improved. Today, he's the Senior DevOps Engineer at that company (my old job), leading a team of 6, and making twice as much money as when he started. If he decides he wants to move to a "top" company at this point, he should have no problem.

I guess my point is that impostor syndrome really sucks, but if you actively work at it, it gets better.

Also, based on your comments on this thread, you seem pretty cool to me. If you're interested, shoot me an email (in my profile), and I'll gladly help you get an interview at my current company (Cloudera).

>I spent my freshman fall pretty much just going to class and straight back to my dorm. [...] one of the guys I'd sat next to in the intro to engineering class invited me to rush his fraternity. [...] I met so many amazing, awesome people it blew my mind.

So I find this slightly confusing, because in my experience of university, the fact I was living in dorms already offered me the opportunities to meet people that you're talking about. Pretty much from the day I arrived, people were sat talking in the corridors, and everyone else was as anxious to meet new people as I was, so I don't know how I could have avoided making friends.

That said, I do know that despite my social anxieties, I tend to be pretty comfortable talking to people I don't know that well (if anything, more so than people I do), so that might have made it easier than I realised.

One thing that does occur to me though, is in the UK alcohol is readily available to students. I realise US colleges are hardly dry, but I'd imagine it's not quite the same as the UK, where almost every student will have their own stock of preferred drinks ready for any social occasion.

Sorry for my ignorance but what's "HONY" style?