Although it may be true of the specific person you're replying to (though I'm not sure that it is), this presumes something, so ends up missing the point. To see the point made here about luck, castes, et cetera requires grappling with the existence of folks who were developers before taking the "shitty testing job". There is no QA-to-dev progression there—just someone without the good fortune to be able to say "no" to the first job they were offered.
A recent guest on Tyler Cowen's podcast made this point wrt to law school graduates:
> The bigger thing I would change is the calendar for professional hiring in law. This is a little bit esoteric, but it matters a lot to our students. If you want to go into a job at a major law firm, and you go to a good law school, those jobs get offered to you at a time when you have no other alternatives. And so, regardless of one’s individual preferences, it makes no sense to turn down those jobs when you actually have no alternative.¶ I think that creates a lot of distortions, where you end up with people who are at these firms who don’t want to be there. And it biases the market so that people who want to go into public interest, for example, are the ones who are able to take that risk on, which is not a very good match between who’s genuinely interested in alternative avenues and who just can’t afford to take certain kinds of risks.
Although it may be true of the specific person you're replying to (though I'm not sure that it is), this presumes something, so ends up missing the point. To see the point made here about luck, castes, et cetera requires grappling with the existence of folks who were developers before taking the "shitty testing job". There is no QA-to-dev progression there—just someone without the good fortune to be able to say "no" to the first job they were offered.
A recent guest on Tyler Cowen's podcast made this point wrt to law school graduates:
> The bigger thing I would change is the calendar for professional hiring in law. This is a little bit esoteric, but it matters a lot to our students. If you want to go into a job at a major law firm, and you go to a good law school, those jobs get offered to you at a time when you have no other alternatives. And so, regardless of one’s individual preferences, it makes no sense to turn down those jobs when you actually have no alternative.¶ I think that creates a lot of distortions, where you end up with people who are at these firms who don’t want to be there. And it biases the market so that people who want to go into public interest, for example, are the ones who are able to take that risk on, which is not a very good match between who’s genuinely interested in alternative avenues and who just can’t afford to take certain kinds of risks.
<https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jamal-greene/>