Your response is curious to me because it suggests multiple unstated biases. I am inferring you suggest: 1. Ambition is more a product of social mobility than

Your response is curious to me because it suggests multiple unstated biases. I am inferring you suggest: 1. Ambition is more a product of social mobility than product delivery. 2. Success is more a product of prior established salary than personal goals. From an economics perspective these seem weird to me for two reasons. The goal of economics is always to redistribute resources to a more desirable pattern. One of the first things I look for in job interviews from interviewers and hiring managers is perception of bias. This is easily discovered by looking at what they want which can be some mixture of technical competency, charm/vanity, or communications dominance. Interviewers want to control the conversation, so just let them until the conversation concludes or I achieve communications dominance passively. I don't want to play games, but when there is noise in the inter-personal communication I have to be a little bit smarter than I appear. I just want a job doing what the paper says, but people are silly. The second reason why its weird is that in the past I have been that 10x (or much more) developer because my goals are different. The only point of software is automation, which means if I can automate my own job then I don't have to do it either. I usually keep this to myself, because the goal is time maximization so I can do other things with my day while delivering superior quality work. If I told other people about it my peers would whine and I would be tasked to do things outside of product delivery to compensate for their whining. I am certainly not looking for anybody's adoration. I just want to do less stupid.