Also curious about this topic but not much useful info will come from this thread, it will be anecdotal at best. My anecdote: grew up poor, started programming

Also curious about this topic but not much useful info will come from this thread, it will be anecdotal at best. My anecdote: grew up poor, started programming to build my own games as my family couldn't afford new hardware. Built systems out of scavenged parts and learned a lot about code optimization. Dev is the key factor that lifted me from poverty in suburban England to a middle class life in NYC (and hopefully beyond, should luck pan out). Most of my peers appear to be from middle/upper middle class backgrounds, but the (faux?) egalitarianism of tech would suggest that the sires of the genuinely rich wouldn't flaunt it as everyone in this industry "made their own success", right? ;)