I’m not a mentor, but I’m in a similar situation. I have a math degree (with some CS) from a unremarkable school, no work experience, no network, and no web presence. I’ve had success getting interviews at large tech companies just by applying online. There’s usually a job listing aimed at recent graduates. I should mention that I have fairly credible signals of CS skill on my resume (meaning I list some things I’ve built and say a few words about each), a decent academic record, and a fortunate aptitude for the sort of algorithm questions they like to ask during screening phone interviews.
To be clear, my first onsite interview is coming up, so who knows how it will turn out :) Be careful who you take advice from! Although this is very limited information, it seems I was under-confident that these companies would talk at all to someone who had e.g. no work experience and no referral. I would have told my past self to apply earlier!
I find the “labor and gentry” division interesting.
There is a sort of conservation argument against the sustainability of elite networks in the absence of the right sorts of coercive power. In addition, our emotion reactions to prestige, which depend more on relative position than absolute power, lead us to exaggerate how much domestic power is actually wielded by elites in a country like Sweden, or even the United States (this includes the self-perceptions of elites). The narrative tone that tends to be used when discussing elites is evidence of this.
Much of the identified elite are the decay products of the former upper echelons of labor and gentry. The known determinants of personal traits make it seem implausible that this group is self-sustaining (as an elite, rather than an upper-middle, group) in the manner that he describes (i.e. shared family environment leading to a dominant personality): And so the cost of valuing an elite appointee in excess of the expected value of their connections (versus investing in a meritocrat) should be large. Unless you can replenish the “wealth” of the network in a non-meritocratic way, this can’t last. So this story says that elites are slowly being relieved of their resources down to the value of their non-network traits, knowingly (via donations) or by fitter agents, with the stock of elites being occasionally replenished by the other ladders. The rate of decay might depend on things like the relative growth rate of the elite, their access to corrupt power, and the strategies of other classes (taxation, exile, killing them, etc). We’d prefer the rate of decay to be higher rather than slower.
Does this argument make sense and predict anything useful? I’m not sure.