If I think about everything I've learned about the world since I was a kid, the thing that would've most surprised kid-me is how privileged the median or even 10%-ile person with a "good" job is, e.g., what's the rate of tech folks at top companies who were too poor to get dental care and have crooked teeth?
1/1000 seems like the right order of magnitude for someone my age or younger in tech and maybe it's 1/100 but, at a population level in the U.S., seems more like 1/5 or maybe 1/10.
Where are all the people who grew up too poor to get dental care ending up? Not in high-end tech jobs, and tech is less highly selected on this than finance, law, etc.
I've interacted with quite a few interns and new grads at big tech companies and, among U.S. born folks, I think the rate of people who were on the U.S. Olympic team is pretty similar to the rate of people who haven't had dental care (IME, the Olympic team rate has been higher, but sampling from tails like this is noisy)
@danluu What year did you graduate? I ask because I'm in a similar tech career, graduated university in 1998, and my high school was well below Texas median, graduated *far* less than 100%, had a number of poor folks getting help with lunch, etc.
I didn't *think* that was unusual where I worked, but maybe it was? It was fairly unusual at CMU, where I went to school.
@codefolio At my first job, a non-prestigious company where the median age of a logic/verification/ucode/circuit engineer when I joined seemed like it was 55 or so, there was a lot more variation in social background (though there was less demographic variation — almost everyone was a white man)
I suspect it's not a coincidence that the one non-prestigious company I worked for is also the one company where it wasn't the case that basically all of the U.S.-born tech folks had perfect teeth, etc.
@danluu I suspect you're right about age. I think my year was one of the last ones where it wasn't clear that "computer programmer" was going to be a particularly good lifetime job (and then it was unclear again for a little while during the dot-com crash.)
You probably got a lot more competition and push from the parents after my age. For the class of '98, it wasn't clear that you were trying for something at least as valuable as an accounting degree/job.
@danluu Amusingly, my teeth are pretty wonky. But I don't get to claim it's from lack of privilege. I was raised as one of those weird rural rich people where we didn't have much anybody else we cared to impress.
I didn't get into computer programming because I wanted a high-prestige job, or because anybody around me really knew anything about it. I just decided on a weird fixation and it turned out to make a bunch of money.
I assume people like me are rarer in recent years.
@codefolio @danluu i started uni in 2005 at the trough of the tech bubbles (and graduated during Great Recession).
at the time iirc we had declining comp sci enrolment, and this is weighted by attending a commuter school in a big city but
most of us were 1st or 2nd gen immigrants hoping to score a Good Job (ie middle class work at a bank or insurance company). nobody thought of getting rich quick.
can’t imagine what it’s like for kids today!
@codefolio A related thing that was really striking to me in college was that CS/Math/Physics folks were much more likely to be "weird" than trad engineers (EE, Civil, etc.).
People who "just wanted a good career" were relatively likely to be "normal" and do medicine / law / trad eng (I was weird and did EE, but in my class, there were only a couple other weird folks, whereas CS was full of weird folks). It seems like CS is now a common "normal person" major, maybe even more than trad eng.
Dan Luu
Noah Gibbs
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