If the Janitor taught himself to code over a period of years as you did he could be working the same job you do.
Guilt for making decisions that other people did not and maybe a bit of luck is not rational.
Tomorrow that janitor might buy a lottery ticket, and win, should he feel guilty that you did not get yourself to the 7-11 and buy the ticket? - I think not.
Are you seriously comparing the privileges given to a white young male working at a tech job in Silicon Valley to those (or lack thereof) of a janitor?
Developers in SV are overwhelmingly male, and generally of European, East Asian, or South Asian heritage. There are very few who are of backgrounds more typically found engaged in janitorial services, typically Hispanic or black.
Pointing out the skewed demographics, if not outright racism and sexism in the software world, is quite on point in the context of TFA.
I would contend that the reason there are not more Hispanic or Black people working as developers has more to do with social and cultural reasons in the home and community and less to do with the willingness to hire them, any decent developer can get a job in the valley.
That's a deferent debate and completely unrelated to the point I was making about the guilt over seeing a janitor who's race was not mentioned, stereotype much?. You can try to twist my comment into something it is not but know that you do so with no basis as you do not know my actual views on the subject.
As I said: skewed demographics, certainly. Outright racism? Quite possibly.
I'm not questioning your views specifically. I'm making a comment on my own informal, but long-duration, observations of composition of technical vs. unskilled positions.
If you can provide racial demographics on people holding janitorial positions, please do.
There are numerous studies which show hiring biases for identical resumes with different names attached to them:
Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback.
My experience with janitorial and housekeeping staff through much of the US, including the west coast, is that they're frequently economically disadvantaged minority or immigrant in ethnicity. It's a low-education position.
A union history of west-coast janitorial labor organization emphasizes Mexican and Hispanic groups: "Unions and the Fight for Multi-Racial Democracy" http://dbacon.igc.org/Unions/11mulrac.htm
Working-class power will determine especially if this democracy represents the needs of African-American, Asian, Latino, Native American and other people of color, who are overwhelmingly working-class themselves.
Guilt for making decisions that other people did not and maybe a bit of luck is not rational.
Tomorrow that janitor might buy a lottery ticket, and win, should he feel guilty that you did not get yourself to the 7-11 and buy the ticket? - I think not.