[lpsz]

Stark contrast with New York Times pieces about struggling liberal arts majors with $120K in debt and no hope.

Given what I feel like is a growing class war in modern America, I wish more could embrace stories like this, and not the culture of putting down others' hard work in the name of "equalization." Some accomplished people (such as Asian immigrants or refugees, in this case) have worked really really hard to get where they are.

[magic_man]

There are many unemployed engineers in India and china. If everyone did software engineering there would be a lot unemployed software engineers.

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-18/news...

There is a lot of luck involved in life. Maybe this guy dies on the boat like a lot of other people. I think silicon valley has a very skewed view of the world.

[yummyfajitas]

The unemployed engineers in India are the bad ones - they got into engineering because it's an easy ticket to a flat/car/wife even if you have no real interest in the field. A few are stuck in a bad location due to family obligations. This is actually a common pattern in tech hiring; you see similar patterns in parts of academia (e.g. math).

If hiring good people was easy then Bangalore wouldn't be paying more than Europe \ London (in nominal rupees, i.e. not adjusted for cost of living.)

Having spent quite a bit of time hiring in India, good luck finding a competent unemployed engineer. (If you can find one, I'll make them employed very quickly.)

[Buge]

I think the point is we should not be encouraging liberal art majors to do software engineering, because the liberal art majors will be bad at software engineering and thus unemployed.

[akilism]

Well the difference is these stories are really really rare where as stories of struggling college graduates with mountains of debt are pretty commonplace.

Might as well tell people to gather inspiration from tales of lottery winners.

[randomgyatwork]

They may be lottery winners, but you have to buy a ticket to play. Maybe the goal of stories like this is to inspire people to try, even if winning is very unlikely people have to play for there to be some winners.

[ap3]

One of them is easy, the other is hard.

Getting into debt is easy. I could go out tomorrow and with 100% certainty buy an expensive car and enroll in an expensive college program.

I could not say the same about going out and starting a billion dollar unicorn.

[stephenitis]

If you think being a refugee and having to flee your home country is winning the lottery?

[samfisher83]

Most refugees don't get out so yes it is like winning a lottery.

[stephenitis]

Being a immigrant in my opinion is absolutely no like winning the lottery as adapting to the new culture, schools, and language was a terrible experience for many that are apart of the Vietnamese American story. Enduring the trauma of racism, bullying, gangs, xenopobia was not be what I would analogize as winning the "lottery".

I'd dare you to ask Thuan, with a straight face, if he feels like he won the lottery. There was a element of luck but by no means you should think that refugees are winning the golden ticket by merely escaping.