I've never seen anybody that had a "lucky" or "unlucky" reputation. Some people are considered to "have been lucky" at some point in time, but nobody considered to have a "luck" or "non-luck" trait.

In other words, I've never observed what you describe, never even heard of it

Luck is magically transformed into talent when seen by outsiders.

A quick google search "are some people lucky" will show that people very much believe in luck as a trait. Like I said, it's irrational, but people believe in it. It's a placeholder for someone who succeeds or fails abnormally, without a visible cause.

Consider this: You're working at a startup that is struggling, and you're interviewing a candidate whose last 5 startups they worked at folded within 6 months of them being hired. As rational as people try to be, there would be a back-of-the-mind superstition that hiring that person would be bad luck.

If you’re at a startup that’s struggling where hiring decisions are made on superstition, you might be the unlucky one...

There are many people involved in influencing the process to hire someone, and as I'm sure you know, many people vote "no" for the most seemingly inconsequential reasons. As superstitious as "bad luck" is, like I stated in my earlier post, it's a placeholder/heuristic for abnormal amounts of failure without a clear cause.

I don't think it's down to bad luck, but it's the fact that there is an undeniable correlation between being a good dev at a startup and that startup succeeding. It's obviously not the strongest correlation, but it's there. If you have two developers, each about equal, and one was a member of a startup that did well, and one wasn't, it's obvious where the chips are going to fall. I don't think anyone calls that luck, even if they probably should at least be aware it could be bad luck.

I get rid of all the unlucky people by randomly throwing resumes away. /s

For the sole purpose of giving a friendly stranger on the internet a "worlds first" :)

I've been told a past boss, verbatim, "Wow, you have shit luck." The tl;dr is that I was working for a university and thus hired "as a college hire." and post-hire the corp had no easy way to rectify this, leading to a permanently set-back promotion track. A series of compounding misunderstandings on this led to this remarkable conversation with such other kernels as "you're kinda screwed, maybe they could fix it on rehire."

That's the tip of the iceberg though, to say I've had a "colorful" life is an understatement, and while I enjoy the bar stories I get to tell, there's certainly a perception that I'm unlucky.

E.g. During schooling I was placed in a random rooming arrangement with a violent drug addict, who later was deported after multiple arrests for beating his girlfriend; but this was after ~ a year of the school covering it up, throwing out his drugs before police showed up, and saying that my attestations weren't worth pursuing further.

I realize that got dark fast but I mean to bring it up to say, who the hell has these sorts of stories. It's like a sitcom. Even looking in on myself it seems absurd, so I can understand why people call it "luck."

To bring this back to the crux of the discussion, I'd use it to say I certainly see some vestige of "luck" in that certain things happen randomly, ala my room assignment, and you may have gotten the good flip on a few key ones; and thus the GP's point is very well taken. I also agree with GP's direct child, although it makes me sad, since I think my "bad luck" has given me exposure to quite a range of experience, one does get strange looks from being repeatedly perceived as the recipient of "bad luck". ("Oh maybe there's something he's not telling us, maybe he's the common cause, etc")