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Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

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Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#281

Post by foobiekr »

gamblor956 wrote: post #266
mcguire wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q: What do you call the founder and CEO of a 1-2 person company that failed and went bankrupt? A: Founder and CEO.

Most people would call them unemployed. Calling oneself Founder and CEO doesn't have much, if any, cachet outside of the tech world, since on its own it doesn't mean anything. What matters is what you actually did at the failed company. You know what a plumber in charge of a plumbing company calls himself? A plumber.

A few years ago I was asked to present at an alumni event. Afterwards I met with groups of students.

It had been a very long day, and after the sixth or seventh group of students that met with me completed their "I'm the CEO, this is the CTO, this is the CMO, this is the COO... on, and this is our engineer" speech I looked at the CEO and accidentally snapped "Well, I guess you've learned an important lesson about how meaningless these titles are."

So I agree with you - the pretentious titles hold very little cachet, and not just outside the tech world, but inside it as well. No one is actually impressed at the zero-experience CEO of his own company until he proves something even in tech.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#282

Post by foobiekr »

ahelwer wrote: post #152
ativzzz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leetcode is becoming the status differentiator for software engineers.

Ahahahaha no absolutely not. Unless they clearly enjoy solving those types of puzzles for their own personal enjoyment, anyone chasing status through leetcode comes off as just kinda pathetic. What an incredible waste of time, like competing to get the highest score on an IQ test. Much more impressive is when people direct their intelligence toward solving problems in high-dimensional domains. Self-contained leetcode…

I'd go even further - if you're doing leetcode questions instead of talking directly to VP/GMs and having them sell you on the role, you aren't high status at all.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#283

Post by ck425 »

fierarul wrote: post #279
ck425 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer a situation where everyone automatically paid for university fees via a graduate tax and no one has the option to pay outright.

This just moves the goalpost. Parents will pay for something that improves the odds of their children. Should a society where that just does not exist or is allowed be preferable? I think nobody wants that.

Perfectly equality isn't possible but we should make it so any child can reach the height of socio-economic success. To do that we occasionally need to tear down the advantages others have such as in this case.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#284

Post by fierarul »

ck425 wrote: post #283
fierarul wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just moves the goalpost. Parents will pay for something that improves the odds of their children. Should a society where that just does not exist or is allowed be preferable? I think nobody wants that.

Perfectly equality isn't possible but we should make it so any child can reach the height of socio-economic success. To do that we occasionally need to tear down the advantages others have such as in this case.

What does the height of socio-economic success bring you if you can't even help in any way your immediate family?

If success means just the ability to buy stuff, the richest person gets the same iPhone, so why bother striving for more?

Perfect equality means total inhumanity and the destruction of family.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#285

Post by scythe »

User23 wrote: post #269
scythe wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the average person just sees them that you list as rich dorks. gp has only listed tech entrepreneurs. Shocking as it may seem to us, the tech industry doesn't have a stellar reputation in some parts of the US/world. However we also have e.g. Donald Trump who ran on his identity as a "businessman" (however farcical), Elon Musk, or Oprah ( http://blackeconomics.co.uk/wp/oprahs-empire/ ), all appealing to different sor…

Trump ran on his identity as Trump. The man successfully "built his personal brand" before that was even a thing. I don't know of an earlier example of "famous for being famous" either. He really is in a class by himself and he objectively proved that by winning the Presidency of the United States. One can actively dislike his personality and policies while still being honest enough to acknowledge his cultural impact…

Trump may be famous for being famous, but the idea of him being a business magnate has always been a core part of that image. That doesn't detract from the significance of his ability to appeal to people far from the usual coterie who read the Economist and who knew about the Trans-Pacific Partnership before 2015, but it does support the original argument that "entrepreneur" qua "business[wo]man" can be a gateway to high social status.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#286

Post by ck425 »

fierarul wrote: post #284
ck425 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfectly equality isn't possible but we should make it so any child can reach the height of socio-economic success. To do that we occasionally need to tear down the advantages others have such as in this case.

What does the height of socio-economic success bring you if you can't even help in any way your immediate family? If success means just the ability to buy stuff, the richest person gets the same iPhone, so why bother striving for more? Perfect equality means total inhumanity and the destruction of family.

Yet if everyone made supporting their family through the generations their primary goal it would lead to incredible inequality as the advantages of those born to well off family allowed them to make their kids even better off and so on, while the less well off could never catch up. We know from experience that excessive levels of inequality leads to destruction of society.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#287

Post by fierarul »

ck425 wrote: post #286
fierarul wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the height of socio-economic success bring you if you can't even help in any way your immediate family? If success means just the ability to buy stuff, the richest person gets the same iPhone, so why bother striving for more? Perfect equality means total inhumanity and the destruction of family.

Yet if everyone made supporting their family through the generations their primary goal it would lead to incredible inequality as the advantages of those born to well off family allowed them to make their kids even better off and so on, while the less well off could never catch up. We know from experience that excessive levels of inequality leads to destruction of society.

The cluelessness is just baffling. I wrote a much longer reply but there's no point in pursuing this further...

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#288

Post by ck425 »

fierarul wrote: post #287
ck425 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet if everyone made supporting their family through the generations their primary goal it would lead to incredible inequality as the advantages of those born to well off family allowed them to make their kids even better off and so on, while the less well off could never catch up. We know from experience that excessive levels of inequality leads to destruction of society.

The cluelessness is just baffling. I wrote a much longer reply but there's no point in pursuing this further...

Please do reply, I'm genuinely interested.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#289

Post by veddox »

probe wrote: post #272
veddox wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn't the same as saying they didn't care about status at all. I read a number of biographies of great US presidents in the last year, and found it fascinating to see that pretty much all of them were i…

Whose biographies did you read and what else did you learn from this study? Sounds like a fun adventure

Started with Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Leadership", which is a 4-in-1 biography of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ. I cannot recommend it highly enough! (Here's my more detailed write-up: https://terranostra.one/posts/Review-Lessons-from-the-Presid...)

Then went on to Ron Chernow's "Washington" (another great book), and am currently on Jean Edward Smith's "FDR".

If you're interested in presidential biographies, have a look at this guy's page: https://bestpresidentialbios.com/

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