> you won’t even be aware of the jobs you’ll be looked over for because you didn’t go to the right school, and those “right schools” pre-select based on background.

I didn't believe in class until I met rich people and got to know them quite well.

For Dutch people, all I say is: go to Delft for university. The UvA sucks, the VU sucks, Eindhoven sucks, Twente is irrelevant. Tilburg? No. Groningen? What? Rotterdam: only if you're doing Economics. Leiden? Too close to Delft.

I know how it sounds, but a recruiter also only looks 10 seconds at your resume. It shouldn't be this way, especially because uni's in The Netherlands are quite close in quality. But when it comes to recruiting, prestige signaling allows you to get the foot in the door and apparently Delft has the prestige.

It was painful seeing/hearing this and experiencing it second hand as someone who graduated from both universities of Amsterdam (VU and UvA).

Class was invisible to me in The Netherlands, and then I met rich people. I wish I hadn't. Though the people are awesome, so I am really happy knowing them. So on a personal level I wish I had, but in terms of outlook on Dutch society: I don't want to know (what I consider to be) the truth. It's depressing information and I don't know what I can do about it other than knowing that if I ever get kids they'll probably get a massive advantage in learning educational things really young.

Definition of rich: at least fat FIRE.

Hurrah for your class consciousness, feed it. Nothing about this is an inevitable rule

> Nothing about this is an inevitable rule

I agree.

> Hurrah for your class consciousness, feed it.

I don't need to feed it. What I need to do is find interesting specific sub-cultures. That's where the consciousness arises, class is just one of the many.

> go to Delft for university

Hmm… Well, that only works for degrees in engineering, it’s a ‘Technical University’. Also, Delft is probably a great university, but it doesn’t strike me as more prestigious than the other Universities you mention.

For what it’s worth, the members of the Royal family all attended Leiden University. As did the current prime minister. Most ministers of justice in recent history attended Leiden University and were a member of Minerva, a conservative student society.

Still, I wouldn’t consider Leiden a particularly prestigious university—none of the Dutch universities are, because they are all relatively accessible and publicly funded. Instead, the well-connected manage to create their own little groups inside of student life. Like the aforementioned Minerva, which like other student societies (that exist in Delft as well), has students make small clusters (jaarclub, dispuut), with all kinds of barriers to entry. I presume the richest kids cluster together. People then rely on these connections throughout their career.

To me it sounds like you met a group of rich people who were friends in Delft University (and I presume already rich) and relied on this network afterwards: this is a pattern that reproduces itself at other Universities. And inversely, attending Delft University is by no means a guarantee that you can profit from this mechanism.

It’s interesting what you say of not seeing class differences before, I think it’s quite common in The Netherlands. The image the Dutch have of their society is one with very little class differences. This might be a comforting idea in day to day live (as you mention) but it also makes it hard to do something about the unfair situations that persist.

Interesting thoughts, I’ll think about this. I don’t have a well thought out response to it at the moment.

Fwiw I went to Eindhoven and I never ever got the idea someone got better opportunities because they went to Delft. Everyone I know considers them to be similar.

And, for context, I know quite some rich/successful people.

Fair enough, the issue with these type of things is that there’s not enough data because it’s quite a sensitive topic. Another issue is that we might be talking about different things without realizing it. It’s my experience that it happens a lit with this topic.

If you really want Dutch employers to drool over your resume, get an American degree.

Nah, Oxford.

Oxford would work better I think.

SO much of it is luck.

I'm from a complicated class background myself, but my dad's family were tinkerers. My grandfather was a factory worker who was obsessed with televisions, so when my dad got into microcomputers, the tools were around for him to start cheaply because he could use/repair broken ones. And then when I was born, my father's experience meant he could help me with coding. (Because in his generation, you had to learn BASIC etc. to do anything).

I'm not any better than say, the kids of my dad's classmates. We were just the family who did the grunt work in an area that really took off. Their grandfathers might have liked sports instead of tearing open tvs.

For me, this is not luck, your parents worked hard from generation to generation instead of watching sports. This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society, it’s an inner stress that they had all their life, “How do I discover or make something to embed myself into a society where I can’t compete on connections or assets.”

You're thinking of this with a modern viewpoint, which holds that tech is inherently useful and a socially-worthy pursuit. This is a very recent cultural ideal: Even when I was growing up (in the 90s), it was way more the 'weird passion project' territory unless you were an academic.

My grandfather was born in 1919, and the parts of TVs he liked weren't the entertaining or cool parts. Furthermore, his obsession was actually detrimental to fulfilling his social role: My father says that his father wasn't good with money in part because he spent too much of it on things to tinker with, and he was socially not the most ept guy.

It was this way for other classes too:

My class background is complicated because my mother is from a decently well-off family but cut off contact and bailed at 15. One example from her childhood/family, however, is that one of her relatives was a tenured academic who helped found the academic study of pop culture. On the other hand, this was something he did after winning a Pulitzer and getting tenure for more serious work.

It's easy to forget, but 2-3 generations ago a tech interest was seen as a potentially useful eccentricity at best outside of a very few select sectors.

Luck is they got into tinkering with TVs which led to tinkering with computers and hence tech. If they had worked hard in laying bricks maybe they wouldn't have had so much success probably.

Or making ships, in which case they would have been betrayed by their government and ended up watching their jobs, and entire professions, get shipped off to Korea.

The irony here is that we got both: Since grandpa's day job was as a factory worker at Oldsmobile, well....

We're Michiganders.

> This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society ...

That seems like a massive assumption about people you don't know.

IMO, a more likely explanation is that people just tend to do the things that their brains find rewarding. I like programming because it feels like playing a puzzle game, so I'll do it for fun. For lots of other people the idea of sitting behind a computer all day solving abstract problems is pure torture.

Doing the dishes on the other hand is not mentally stimulating so I kind of avoid it until I have to do them. So my place usually isn't as clean or tidy as it could be. I also know people who enjoy the process of cleaning and tidying, and their place is always clean and tidy.

I don't think these people are more virtuous than I am for keeping their place cleaner, nor do I think that I'm more virtuous than others because I enjoy programming and can make things that they cannot. None of this is caused by abstract pondering about one's value to society. We just follow the reward structure of our brains.

> This desire to tinker also comes from a thrive to provide something of value to society

Meh, not necessarily. I like to tinker, but I wouldn't say I do it to provide value for anyone (and throwing something on GitHub won't provide value to almost anyone)

The biggest problem is demonstrated here too. You have no experience of existing in a higher social category, so your anecdotes of what you imagine it to be like are purely bogeyman fiction traded between lower classes.

That's bollocks. I attended a prep school where most kids came from multi-millionaire families. They knew their privilege inside and out, and weren't shy about broadcasting this knowledge. OP is not wrong.

In my experience, the rich and wealthy are pretty self-aware.

It's the upper-middle class who are really uncomfortable with their social position.

That is just selection bias, people who aren't rich have to work and therefore you meet them even when they don't want to socialize. Rich people who don't want to socialize don't need to, so you only see those who really wants to be out there and meet people.

Well, in my case, when I bumped arms with the rich and well off was mostly back before I was 25. There's some occasional intermixing between the talented peasants and the kids of the wealthy at things like prestigious scholarship trips and the like.

This would probably hold true if I were going just based on the rich people I knew through work since most of them I've interacted with as a representative of my organization (which they have some interest in), so you'd be correct that there's a motive there.

You have touched on one of the biggest reasons I am against private school. We can't force our countrymen to know each other as adults but I think they should start in the same classrooms.

I go back and forth on the question. I definitely think we need to get rid of the two-tier system that's functionally 'pay to play', but I don't think just public schooling is going to solve the issue, because the problem with putting either the peasant Einstein or oligarch's kid in a normal school is that their arrogance is almost never curbed, because there are a lack of peers to call them out. The exception to this would be areas where those groups cluster together: A Silicon Valley or DC public school might have enough privileged kids that they can call each other out.

On the other hand, I'm a talented peasant who went to a public school system of ~30 kids per grade. Setting aside IQ's usefulness as a measure, I had an IQ of ~145, which meant I was not socializing with the other kids the way I should have, and it also meant that (once the tests identified it), most adults were not interested in addressing my arrogance or mistreatment of other people. I very clearly remember in late elementary school, I viewed my classmates very similarly as I did to intelligent dogs. I can see a very similar thing happening to the one wealthy kid in, say, an Appalachian school. Sure, you're all nominally equals, but if the teachers need to go to your parents for help with the school supplies, you're not going to be disciplined in the same manner as other children, and wealthy parents teach their children to use their social status.

I'd be wary of solving social isolation between classes by opening up more ability for local fiefdoms to pop up. (Think of local business owners that are POSes to their employees because they know their only other option is Walmart.) From the point of view of the average citizen, neither type of ruler/elite is good to deal with.

This isn't class mattering, it's kids thinking class matters, and trying to build themselves up by virtue of it. They are literally trying to convert real class into "cool-at-school" props, which should tell you how much they get out of the first.

When enough people believe in a thing, it has a measurable effect. That's what we're talking about, here.

Not British but here’s something I noticed when we acquired a company with an office in the Bay and in the UK (London, if it matters).

At the US office you just parked in the first available spot. In the UK office there were assigned parking spots for anyone with a management position closest to the door, roughly sorted by tittle. And the accents sounded a little bit different (for the British employees) between engineering and management and sales.

Most people don’t drive to work in London. The city is too dense.

Depends on where in London.

Central London, absolutely no driving.

Somewhere a bit further out of central London like Sydenham or Ruislip and I can see people driving to the office. If it’s there.

In NZ, we made a deliberate effort to avoid the class system of the UK in certain ways (e.g., hunting and trout fishing are far more egalitarian here), but we also imported it in some ways.

Some families in Christchurch are very proud of being descended from "First Four Shippers" (colonists who arrived on the four ships that started the settlement of Christchurch), and they all try to send their children to the "right" schools (private ones), but the old boys' club is far weaker here (seems to exist mainly in law firms).

And no-one has class related accents (although a private primary school called Medbury, is very proud to teach a particular accent to its pupils, but they typically have it bullied out of them within a year at high school.

I once lived for almost a year in NZ. Afterwards, when people asked me about it, I often say: "Think about England without the class system." If I were to speculate on a reason for this, I would say that NZ perhaps had few upper-class immigrants. So there was no upper-class to begin with, which put NZ on a different trajectory. Does that sound plausible?

Definitely - while we had a few Lords and Barons and what-not turn up, they were typically here as adventurers/mercenaries[0] or amateur scientists. And usually not from the English nobility.

The people looking to move to colonies from Britain were typically those who were willing to risk the long sea voyage and the hard grind for a chance to build a better life. And English companies set up to colonise NZ focused on bringing large amounts of the working class so that they could do what was needed to make the "estates of gentlemen" productive.

But then combine the gold rushes[1, 2, 3], the Scottish colonisation of Otago/Õtākou[4], and other people settling who had no ties to the English class system (Irish via Australia, Chinese gold miners, Scandinavians up in Dannevirke), the the English class system was never going to really take hold, although the people who formed the new "upper classes" in terms of property holdings and social status did try to maintain it.

And all that said, the Canterbury Association that formed Christchurch did its best to ensure that Christchurch was the most "English city", it was strongly tied to the Anglican church which was gifted rather large plots of land (as was the Anglican private school, Christ's College[5], still a large landlord in the city), and indeed, the Canterbury diocese still holds a rather large property portfolio[6].

Christchurch is probably the most likely place for people to ask which school you went to, and where going to the same school as your interviewer might open some doors, but it's a lot less prevalent these days, IMO.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavus_von_Tempsky

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Gold_Rushes

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otago_Gold_Rush

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Gold_Rush

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Otago_Region#Sc...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ%27s_College,_Christchur...

[6]: https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/89760490/churchs...

> only through sheer dumb luck of loving computers

It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind. It almost sounds like you're ashamed of how easy it was for you to escape your circumstances. Remember that the good times don't actually last forever, and you might reach a ceiling in your career that other people in other professions don't have to deal with.

Also, being a software engineer isn't the only profession that pays well. It just so happens that due to modernity, it's extremely accessible.

As someone who has been incredibly lucky _and_ has worked very hard to surpass a rough start, I think it simply helps to have a thorough understanding of what it means to be lucky.

You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice. Luck would literally have to come and hunt you down at random. If you're pretty good at [whatever] but at the right places (including virtually) and meeting the right people, luck will work far better for you.

In both cases, luck is important. You can be among the best and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do well in every competition, and be first to launch with every idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly, repeatedly. Which is why we like to say it's important to get used to losing. Because even if you're very good and always in the right places at the right times with the right people - you _still_ need luck.

You just need less luck than someone who isn't showing up every day. And a lot less luck than someone literally doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. But you still need luck.

Everything is luck. You ability to learn, acquire and utilize knowledge, physical ability, not getting struck by lightning, being able to play basketball at the level of Lebron James, etc. None if it was earned - some dice were rolled when you were born and that's it.

> You could be the best [whatever] in the world, but if you're on your couch and disconnected, nobody will ever notice.

That is entirely based on luck. Were you born with the correct genetics and environment to get you off your couch or not?

> You can be among the best and be at every conference and active on every forum, and do well in every competition, and be first to launch with every idea, and get funded every time, and still lose badly, repeatedly

There's no difference between getting struck by lightning or being born with the right genetics that give you determination, intelligence, work ethic, etc. All luck.

I don't get this fixation with acknowledging how lucky one is when all of it is luck. We should be concerned with optimizing society so that we get to a point where no human has to struggle any more.

Yeah, it's luck. It's perfectly healthy to frame things as: I took a deep interest in computers for which expertise is now in high demand.

I'm in the same boat: loved computers early on and had no interest in pursuing them professionally (I was eight when I started programming). It's lucky because I could just as well have loved botany, or auto mechanics, or pottery, etc but I happened to pick the one that later in life was in high demand.

Sure, yeah, I worked hard, but not because "I want to make MONEY when I get older!" but simply because I had the interest (and supportive parents...luck again). The alignment of my early interests and market conditions today are 100% luck. And that's what you need: to be in the right place at the right time. I'd attribute my success to 10% personal factors and 90% external factors.

You still need to work your ass off for that 10%, but the other 90% is all out of your hands, and it's ok to acknowledge this (and that doesn't mean you feel guilty). In fact, if we ever want to create a world where the ratio is not 90/10, but 80/20 or 60/40 or dare I say 50/50, we need to acknowledge just how much of our lives is out of our control.

No reason to be ashamed of luck. I feel tremendously lucky that I have enough brain power to be a decent programmer and engineer. This has helped me to recover from bouts of massive depression. There were years where I basically dropped out life but once things got better I was able to find well paying jobs pretty easily. I feel I am very lucky to have that fallback that a lot of other people don’t have. I was not so lucky that somehow I never seem to be able to improve my social skills much.

I think a lot of life is luck and it’s ok to admit that. I hate it when people who got lucky reject that idea and try to make you believe that it’s all hard work and if other people only worked hard they could achieve the same. I know enough people who simply don’t have the talent to do what I can do and there are plenty of things I can’t do no matter how hard I work.

I am also lucky that I have decent looks so it’s not too hard to find a partner despite my often painful shyness and awkwardness. Other people aren’t that lucky.

> It's not healthy to frame it this way in your mind.

I don't think this is unhealthy. I liked computers, my sibling liked painting... only one of us got a high-paying job and can afford a lot of leisure time and travel. I don't think that it requires shame to acknowledge that luck had something to do with it. Luck is ever-present in our lives.

Software engineering has an incredibly low barrier to entry for a technical profession and has no formal checks. There’s plenty of smart people who don’t grok it.

I guess just be grateful, don’t take your current circumstances for granted, and try and be kind to others if you can.

Genuinely asking, as someone who frames my own circumstances similarly, what would you say is a healthy way to frame things?

Fwiw I disagree with it being unhealthy and I view myself the same way. It IS lucky that my only hobby/interest I’ve ever really had also happens to be something that pays so well.

Nothing unhealthy about recognizing one’s luck and being correspondingly grateful for it.

Just throwing another opinion in the mix. I think it's healthy to recognize one's own work in addition to that dumb luck. It's certainly lucky that we liked computers but it's also true that a lot of us worked hard and took advantage of our lucky situations. That's not to say we succeeded on hard work alone, far from it - luck is a crucial part, but it's also unfair to not give yourself a little credit sometimes.

Being willing to take advantage of the luck by working hard, taking risks, having a vision as to how to succeed and be useful. It is very much about empowering both yourself and others. The luck part is there to help prevent the "I did this, why didn't you?" crappy privileged perspective, but it needs to be balanced with the drive.

As an example, over a decade ago, I quit a job with no plans of getting another one. Someone I knew told me about an opportunity (luck / connections), and I pursued it. It was hard at first, but now it is almost a turn-key operation. Still requires work, but far less than it did at the beginning. It has netted me a good tidy sum which has been crucial for living the life I want.

Was it luck? Absolutely. Was it my own ability, hard work, and willingness to take that step? Yes. What would have happened had I said no? No idea, but probably less of a good outcome.

Ideally, one tries to frame one's life to be empowering but not arrogant, not trivializing the difficulty of other's paths. Luck is not empowering. Belief that hard work alone can get you to the height is not empowering. Some mixture of these things, that can be empowering. Understanding that the goal is to be useful to others as well as yourself, that's really empowering.

I would say it's unhealthy to think of it as only luck.

It's luck that you like something that is sought after in the job market. But actually spending years learning about it, and sometimes learning things you may not like so much because they are needed for the job, takes effort.

> actually spending years learning about it,

I mean, I did this for fun while I was still in high school. Did I put in a lot of hours? Yes. Were there some frustrating bits? Sure. But I know plenty of people who had to put far more work in to get mediocre grades in their high school qualifications than I've ever put into learning programming.

Framing any and all success (maybe not what OP is doing, but a lot of people do this so it's probably worth addressing) as "sheer dumb luck" implies that you think there's a lot of things in your life that are outside your control when they really aren't. The OP may have deliberately chose that wording to convey that _in their case_, their love for computers was something they pursued completely and entirely ignorant of it being a high-demand/high-paying field. There's a lot of people that have convinced themselves that the odds of them getting a well paying job and doing better for themselves are approaching zero, for no reason other than believing that the only way to have that happen is to be born into it or to have "sheer dumb luck". That prophecy fulfills itself.

There's luck involved, but it's only part of the story.

Discussions on the role of luck in success pop up here on HN from time to time, and one pattern that stands out to me is that, for a good chunk of people, it seems really important to their sense of identity that luck is at best a minor factor in their success.

Your post is one of the more direct renderings of that point of view: you don't really argue that the parent post is wrong, merely that it's not a healthy way to frame it. Which makes me curious: why do you believe that it is bad for someone to believe that their success is largely caused by luck?

As an aside, personally I subscribe to this view on the interaction of luck and success: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I

But the thing is, you could be a class bullshitter, just like the woman the article describes! There is no objective test to determine if you had to overcome "extreme adversity" or if you were "privileged" like most middle/upper-class people were.

I understand what you’re saying but there’s nothing I can point to in my life that gave me privilege. Even being white and male have largely been detriments to my life as a lot of things designed to help low income people tended to have racial qualifiers.

Which incidentally made me a bit racist until I overcame that, because ultimately it’s nobodies fault.

I have no “absentee dad who helped out” and my family all died before I was 5 leaving behind a pitiful inherentence that barely covered their burials.

I get what you’re saying. But the reason it pisses me off is that while I have been extremely lucky, I sometimes wish to speak to my friends who were not so lucky and did not escape like I have. Having people discredit my lived experience or pretending as if it was the same for then us not helping them or me.

> “right schools” pre-select based on background

No, on money.

When I was seven I went to a public school (which in the UK is sort of like a posh private school, from a US perspective). To get in, at seven, we had to take an entrance exam on maths, science, and English. So to pass this I went to a feeder school from literally the age of two and a half to prepare for the exam. My entire class came from others who went to feeder schools. This in turn prepped us for the public school exam to get into senior school (which had a 100% success rate). And that in turn prepped a lot of people for the Oxbridge exams and so on.

So yes, money is the trick, but it’s not worth it. I burned out at school hard because I’d been going at it for so long.

Obviously money talks, but a school like Eton would be more willing to take a somewhat wealthy aristocrat than a common as muck lottery winner.

If you come into a hundred million overnight, that doesn’t make up for your previously deprived life and the associated markers (lower register, lack of childhood polo lessons, no time/money/inclination to go play white saviour in the third world)