Winning the lottery and other certainties
Every now and again, someone who knows that I'm a software developer, but is not a software developer him- or herself, tells me about how much money certain software developers make by developing mobile applications (or, in one recent case, web sites). Knowing quite a few software developers (including myself) who are somewhat less wealthy than the heroes of these stories, I've come to suspect that telling the stories is akin to telling an out-of-work actor that Tom Cruise makes millions of dollars starring in Hollywood blockbusters. Sure, a select few people do make millions of dollars by hitting upon the right software or being picked up for the right films, but most of us surely have much more modest prospects — just ask your average actor.
The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran a happy, but measured, story along these lines in its "My Career" section (Dotty over phone apps, 29-30 March 2014, p. 13). It's not completely clear to me what the hero of the article is actually employed to do, but the thrust of the article is that he has successfully converted an interest in computing into a career by finding work with an iPhone app developer. In that sense, he doesn't seem much different from me or a lot of other computer scientists: we started out with an interest in computing, got degrees in it, and ended up working with computers in one capacity or another. I imagine similar things happen for people with interests in other things, at least some of the time.
To its credit, the SMH story doesn't make it out to be quite so easy as my non-developer colleagues sometimes seem to think it is, and nor is its hero made out to be particularly wealthy. Nonetheless, My Career and similar publications only interview winners: people reading the employment pages of the newspaper aren't likely to be seduced by the lives of sessional academics, out-of-work actors and other frustrated folks.
I suppose a gung-ho business type might say that I lack the entrepreneurial spirit required to create an opportunity that would make me rich. Perhaps I do: I'm typically risk-averse and I didn't take up engineering because I was interested in running businesses (or, for that matter, because I expected to be wealthy). But I think such gung-ho-ness might also be glossing over the part of the definition of entrepreneur that involves being the one who bears the risk of an enterprise. Cherry-picking the fates of successful entrepreneurs, who accepted the risk and won, ignores the fate of the many entrepreneurs who accepted the risk and lost. The result is the dubious supposition that entrepreneurial behaviour is a sure path to wealth.
Coincidentally, the April 2014 issue of IEEE Spectrum contained an insert full of advice to job-seeking graduates that nicely illustrates this sort of cherry-picking, apparently unconsciously: three short articles outlining all the wonderful job opportunities that exist throughout the world are followed by a long article (How to Stand Out in Your Job Search) describing how graduates can stand out from the hundreds of other graduates also seeking such opportunities. Sure, someone out of those hundreds is going to end up with the job, and you have to be in it to win it, but surely no level-headed assessment of such competition could conclude that everyone, or even many people, are destined to win.
