Assessing the talent is hard. People who have the ability to assess that talent (which is different from the talent itself, also uncommon) are rare, people who

Assessing the talent is hard. People who have the ability to assess that talent (which is different from the talent itself, also uncommon) are rare, people who have the money or organizational position necessary to pay significant numbers of programmer salaries are rare, and the intersection of those two sets, even in a world with almost 7 billion people, is vanishingly small. The talent is rarer than the capital, and the capital often isn't owned by the decision-makers (VC) but the people who control the capital are the ones who get more arrogant. Why? Because capital is easy to demonstrate, and talent is hard to prove. It's especially hard to prove talent without breaking social protocol, which is the real advantage of pedigree. Everyone knows that there are plenty of sharp people without pedigree, but proving you're one of them requires being extremely assertive. Professionally, it's often better to be presumed intelligent and thereby be able to optimize for social polish alone.