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Yeah but like I'm sure there's a relatively niche employment spot right now that will turn out to be the big hindsight winner circa 20 years from now. AI researcher was a skilled profession 15 years ago but you weren't paid Lebron James money for the bleeding edge and there's now way more of a glitch of people entering the field.
But yeah there's a reason there's a meme with talking to 50 year olds in elite jobs now and getting 'I started my career at 27 after spending 3 years backpacking and getting turned onto this field by a newspaper ad after junior college' versus the new graduates being the absolute bleeding edge of filtering.
Hell my dad managed to get to a very senior offshore oil platform design electrical engineering position with 2 years before dropping out of a third-tier undergrad and a trade electrician cert. These things happen when you're born in 1949 and get in early on a field that ends up exploding in relevance
Lmao, AI research was an extremely niche profession 15 years ago. AlexNet came out in 2012 and pioneered deep learning which lead to transformers/LLMs. The only people who were AI researchers were college professors and the occasional industry researcher. You had a number of folks doing data science/ML engineering but it was pretty much just a sub-domain of statistics as thats what boosting/SVMs/Random Forests are.
That's the point though. Occasionally the economic fairy will come through and bless something to go from academic curiosity to instant megabucks then inevitably every university in the land will dilute the original credential to nothing
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The only person I can think of who just lucked into their position without heavy filtering today feels like JD Vance. Sure he got into Yale Law, but he sort of just wrote a book that was ok professionally. Then met a billionaire who turned him into the VP. US politics might be the only place I can think of where some of it just feels lucky.
There are still tons of people who get lucky. There are random people in PR or marketing at nvidia worth millions. I know a lot of midwit at best people who coasted around non-technical startup jobs (copywriting, project management, marketing, social) who ended up at companies like Coinbase and Revolut who are either rich or going to be. There are always new businesses blowing up.
Similarly in American politics, the most common route is still elite upper middle class childhood - HYPS undergrad - HYS law - clerkship - DC. There are exceptions in every field. Even in quant finance there are a handful of people every year who get recruited out of nowhere because despite no real credentials they contribute enough useful research. I’ve met one, a Balkan immigrant with little formal education.
I think people just see this through the lens of hindsight. There were tons of people in the 70s who did the ‘smart thing’, went to a top college, got a grad job (‘management trainee position’) at IBM or PanAm, and never made fortunes.
I feel like the 70s equivalent still do fine on the aggregate though even if they don't teleport into billionaires. Just being a solid MBA type and pulling in 85th percentile income for a 30 year career is a perfectly good and stable life
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US Politics you're gonna be way more aware of people who end up in the top jobs. There's still plenty of right time, right place hugely-successful people but the traditional UMC path has become exponentially more arduous as a result of striver optimization.
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