4 ms·

There's a difference between social classes, which exist in nearly every country, and a caste system. Castes are hereditary, you are born into a caste. Very fe

There's a difference between social classes, which exist in nearly every country, and a caste system. Castes are hereditary, you are born into a caste. Very few people are born into tech. Anyone working in San Francisco probably realizes that most people in Bay Area tech weren't even born in the Bay Area. Working in Bay Area tech is a choice, one which requires hard work and quite a lot of luck. People are born with varying degrees of privilege, which makes it easier for some than others to get a tech job, that isn't a caste system. I've been on a tech career path since I was a teenager, but with one parent who was a teacher and the other who was a construction worker, it wasn't like I was born into it. I've worked with plenty of people who have made the transition to a tech career later in life. Like one person who said he was tired of digging ditches so he went to tech bootcamp. The classes in SF are extreme. The pay disparity is too large. It is really hard for a lot of people to get by. But it isn't a caste system.

xapata 8y ago
You're a counter example, but many professions are indeed hereditary. With some probability, anyway. Calling it a caste system is an exaggeration, obviously, but there's a nugget of truth. Go survey some dentists. You'll be surprised how many of their parents were dentists.
s-shellfish 8y ago
You are given some advantages from the people around you. My father was a construction worker. He also was a hobbyist technical person, and besides the obvious of introducing me from computer to computer since a very young age, he also taught me how to think in ways that are very advantageous for thinking technically, rigorously, and logically. Education is important and the people you have around you either compete against information or reinforce it. Construction is mechanical work. It operates in accordance to rules that are easy to observe and aren't subject to chaotic, dynamic shifts. It is a literal concrete foundation of how to build things. Don't excuse my puns, they are intentional. Some people simply don't have enough information in the background to reinforce one way of reasoning versus another, and lots of these kinds of things can direct what path you wind up traveling in, especially when as a child, you don't have the awareness to understand how world views get constructed, because you haven't seen enough cycles of it happening, nor had the time to think about it.

xapata 8y ago

You're a counter example, but many professions are indeed hereditary. With some probability, anyway. Calling it a caste system is an exaggeration, obviously, but there's a nugget of truth. Go survey some dentists. You'll be surprised how many of their parents were dentists.

s-shellfish 8y ago

You are given some advantages from the people around you. My father was a construction worker. He also was a hobbyist technical person, and besides the obvious of introducing me from computer to computer since a very young age, he also taught me how to think in ways that are very advantageous for thinking technically, rigorously, and logically. Education is important and the people you have around you either compete against information or reinforce it. Construction is mechanical work. It operates in accordance to rules that are easy to observe and aren't subject to chaotic, dynamic shifts. It is a literal concrete foundation of how to build things. Don't excuse my puns, they are intentional. Some people simply don't have enough information in the background to reinforce one way of reasoning versus another, and lots of these kinds of things can direct what path you wind up traveling in, especially when as a child, you don't have the awareness to understand how world views get constructed, because you haven't seen enough cycles of it happening, nor had the time to think about it.