So more likely it is a requirement after all ? I say it to be a requirement because definitely not my personality trait or a skill... so something I need to figure out how to do (depending on if there are more of such team members wherever I land next, if it all in a tech job. Even if there is one such bright spark then they start creating the expectation for others. My manager quite clearly let that out not quite literally but not hard to read between the lines)

Reich said that was all bullshit and there was no social mobility, but that's the attitude of a professor who got his start when it was a lot easier to break into academia -- since then he's seen many many people enter the bottom of the funnel and very few make it to the end.

Contrast that to people in the construction business who probably know two Italian brothers who escaped a failing agricultural economy in the south of Italy and bought a bulldozer and made a reputation for themselves putting in sidewalks or curbs or the Polish immigrant who grew his construction empire and wound up owning 50 medium-sized apartment buildings or the guy who went to architecture school, made it big in asbestos remediation and deconstruction and is now moving into advanced manufacturing. These entrepreneurs aren't distant figures like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg but rather the kind of people I meet at birthday and graduation parties because their kids play on the same sports teams as people who work as accountants, hairdressers and jobs like that.

Getting a PhD and being Jewish or Black are two things that, like Reich, are likely to make you think life is a zero sum game:

https://socialeconomicslab.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ze...