[ThrowawayR2]

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 survival tactic and the rewards can be immense if you can stomach it.

This isn't unique to tech companies; academia is known for similar things, e.g. "publish or perish". High-competition environments breed dysfunctional behavior unless well managed.

[PaulHoule]

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 enter the bottom of the funnel and very few make it to the end.

Contrast that to people in the construction business who probably know two Italian brothers who escaped a failing agricultural economy in the south of Italy and bought a bulldozer and made a reputation for themselves putting in sidewalks or curbs or the Polish immigrant who grew his construction empire and wound up owning 50 medium-sized apartment buildings or the guy who went to architecture school, made it big in asbestos remediation and deconstruction and is now moving into advanced manufacturing. These entrepreneurs aren't distant figures like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg but rather the kind of people I meet at birthday and graduation parties because their kids play on the same sports teams as people who work as accountants, hairdressers and jobs like that.

Getting a PhD and being Jewish or Black are two things that, like Reich, are likely to make you think life is a zero sum game:

https://socialeconomicslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ze...

[gsf_emergency_2]

Aside: Do you know Reich's son is CEO of College Humor?

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")