[lordnacho]

The drawing of the pyramid addresses something I've been saying to people for years on this topic:

School is conveyor belt. Everyone can be educated, everyone can learn what they teach you in school. Depending on where you went, you can all be high quality or you can all be terrible. You can pretend to compete, but in the end, nobody is really stopping you from anything.

Work, and by that I mean high-achievement work that is the type of thing that the top kids end up applying for, is a pyramid. You can have the cream of the crop starting a new analyst class, every single one of them a top 1% achiever in education. Most of them by far (like really far) will not be MD or CEO. Whether you are the guy who makes it rarely depends on anything you have control over.

I need to tell people this, because if you go to a top uni, you've run into a lot of people who were studious, ambitious kids. They think "hey, if I put more effort in, I get rewarded". Which is true for these non-rivalrous things like science exams.

Then they graduate, and if you were an ambitious kid there's a fair chance you gravitate towards certain careers. And in those careers, the game is different. If you think being a good kid will help you, you will be frustrated. Other young professionals have got the same plan, to stay up until the early hours working. Or spending time playing the politics game. IMO you can't really win at the pyramid game, even if you make it to the top there's a lot of sacrifice and a lot of nervousness about whether you get there and how long you can stay.

[majormajor]

Yes and no. On the flip side, you now have the means to have a much more comfortable and pleasant life than the high school dropout classmate you haven't seen in six years.

You have already made it very far, in that sense.

You put effort in, you've gotten rewarded. The washouts from the up-or-out places have lots of soft landing places available compared to most people.

Whether you crash yourself against the rocks of having to be the top of the absolute whole world... that's a personal thing. Being aware of the structure is probably good for informing your decision, but you might've noticed it earlier too.

Other people have gotten rewarded more than you. And this is probably not new to you. There are almost always teacher's pets, spoiled brats whose parents gave them way more than you, beautiful people who get things handed to them for existing, easily-charismatic assholes who coast by or fail upward because everyone likes them, etc. One of the dirty secrets of elite high schools and higher education is already that not everyone worked as hard as you to get there.

[rendaw]

You say no but you're not disagreeing - you're saying that there's enough space in the middle of the pyramid for all the people who didn't drop out of school which AFAICT is orthogonal to GP's point, that there's not enough space at the tip of the pyramid for all the talented people who work very hard.

[MichaelZuo]

There’s obviously can’t be enough space for every moderately above average person who works very hard… since that adds up to tens of millions to hundreds of millions of people across the world.

[listenallyall]

I disagree that competition among fellow high-achievers is the primary obstacle. Maybe, very early on, when you're in a class of investment banking recruits or first-year law associates, etc. But that gets sorted out in the first few years.

The next 25+ years of your career are often dealt navigating corporate politics, financiers' M & A, industry developments, etc. And it's here that lots of smart, academically excellent people struggle. You can be the world's greatest data scientist, but if you are revealing truths that your boss (or boss's boss) doesnt like, you're probably going to get bounced. You could be doing a great job managing a large group of employees and operating your division efficiently, but some private equity fund buys your owners out and strip-mines the company. Many, many more scenarios. But these aren't "hopeless" situations, there is opportunity to succeed, but that opportunity is based upon people skills as opposed to the academic ideal of right answers vs wrong.

[M95D]

> [...] top 1% achiever in education. Most of them by far (like really far) will not be MD or CEO.

It's called the Dilbert principle [1], and also Putt's law [2].

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successfu...

[Garlef]

One addendum: The pyramid has a top by construction; The top exists no matter what.

In a sports tournament: Someone is going to win, no matter how good the participants are.

[oceanplexian]

Is it weird that I have a totally different perspective on this? Then again I dropped out of college at 19 to start working in Big Tech (tm) after exiting my startup and have been there 15+ years now.

It doesn't matter how fast you spin your wheels working on things unless those things are aligned with delivering value to actual paying customers. Politics also doesn't really matter. Well, it matters to idiots, there are certainly a lot of those out there, and there's some truth that if you piss off the wrong idiot you're likely to be kicked out to the curb. But at the end of the day the times I or anyone else I know has created real business value, it has been heavily rewarded with promotions, money, etc.

The problem I see with a lot of academics is, like you mentioned, even if they are smart and spend a lot of time on interesting and hard problems, if they can't draw a straight line from their project to whatever business problem they are actually solving they don't last particularly long.

[kstenerud]

It depends a lot on where you end up. There are niches where you can live by market forces alone, and breeze through life being almost unaware of politics - but that's the exception.

For most people, politics will be a dominant force - if not THE dominant force - that they live or die by. Once more than 2 people are involved, you by definition have politics (albeit weak politics). It then grows slightly until it suddenly becomes much more important at about 150 people or so. By the time you're at 1000 it's a major force, and at 5000 it's the only force that matters anymore.

And even if it's not your organization that's this big, a small company selling to Amazon will only succeed if they know how to play Amazon politics.

[whoknowsidont]

>It doesn't matter how fast you spin your wheels working on things unless those things are aligned with delivering value to actual paying customers.

Really doesn't matter. I promise you. It might score you some points, sure. But it's not required or necessary.

>Politics also doesn't really matter.

It is the only thing that matters.

[no_wizard]

> It is the only thing that matters.

This the long and short of it. It comes into play at some point either being your accelerator or your ceiling, depending on how things go.

[listenallyall]

This is a little tricky. I think it's more about understanding the philosophy. Lets say you make washing machines. The "academic" will say, great, for next year's model, let's fix the most common failure point and improve reliability so our customers love us while the "psycopath" or "savvy employee" will say, no, our brand is still strong, let's make cheaper machines and save money and we can manipulate some of the review sites and anyway, better for us if they fail after 6 years than 10 years, the customers don't have many choices anyway.

You can say the academic isn't solving the business problem, which isn't, how to make the best washing machine, but how can we make the most money by embracing enshittification. But that's probably not why he was hired.

[trod1234]

That's a false dichotomy.

You also neglect that all business must necessarily account for inflation in their cost model (an impossible task). Enshittification is just the end result of money-printing through banking loans on the business cycle, that's why it follows the same adoption curves as ponzi.

The end result of that cycle is predictable, and has been discussed quite rationally but many people don't actually read books these days so its become lost knowledge.

The sieving and centralizing monopolization we see all comes from those entities being closer to the source of money than individuals. The systems of banking today neglect the true sources of the wealth of nations instead utilizing slave labor through clever recapture (of debasement lost to inflation). In aggregate these things creates a system where over-expenditure must be paid for by your children's distributed slavery; creating a hellscape of an environment where they are disadvantaged and may not survive. Its al indirect, but indirect things can be quite powerful and if you don't have the mind to grasp it your just trapped like an animal, not given the choice. A slave.

Usury eventually and inevitably gets to catastrophic levels given sufficient time, as all positive feedback systems do, left unattended.

[cudgy]

Says the 19 year old startup founder who drops out of college and has it made before most people even start thinking of what they want to do.

We’re all supposed to believe what? That the extremely rare 19 year old startup founders of the world believe the world is meritocratic? Uh, of course they do.

[closeparen]

Even if you "make it" in the context of your career and organization, you will lose in the housing market of any metropolitan area where such careers are on offer, simply because other people were there first.

[creer]

The pyramid is mostly a question of incorrect perspective or viewpoint.

Of course there are fewer CEOs, managing directors or whatever your current fantasy is. But there are millions of them on the planet - it's not that small of a class.

- Many of which are in their 20s or 30s because they created their own business or joined a tiny team or found an employer with just the right yearning (which would be half their fault but also half yours for looking for it).

- Learning how the world works is a life's work. It's fine if you couldn't hierarchy in your 20s, there is still time to learn.

- "Not with that attitude, you won't". If you are still obsessed with anti-corporate political ideas (as a random example), just perhaps that won't help you. That will seriously constrain how or if you continue learning about how the world really works. If you find a different obsession as things go (like a family, say), there is nothing wrong with that - but don't blame it on the pyramid. "The world" is a complex dynamic system of billions of people, interactions and ideas. It has NOTHING to do with your current preconception.

- As you continue growing up, you might find very different interests: public interest, scientific, engineering prowess, family time again, a completely different career direction, self-employment, technical or management consulting, art or craft - and there is nothing wrong with any of these. Your yearning of "top 1% recognition" that you identified with in school - or wished you identified with in school - will have changed and that's fine.

And this is true for everyone in that specific pyramid that you think is in front of you. If the top - some top - is truly your purpose in life, very few people in that pyramid are truly your competitors in your own race.

But this is hard to internalize. Most schools do not train for this. And school was presenting you with convenient easy(? lol) hurdles which work life does NOT. In life after school, you have to manage your own scoreboard, year in year our, decade in decade out - and this can be wearing. And there again, you can find mentors who WILL help open your eyes - if you bother to (easy right? no still not - but feasible for the people who try.)

And this is triple true if you switched country during or after your studies. You are now in an environment that you didn't even grow up in and you have far more to learn. A very serious disadvantage that will take additional energy to overcome - but will also help open your eye to this idea that you do have a lot to learn about how the world works (while the natives assume they already know.)