AI is hot. So therefore there is a huge spotlight on all angles there. You can argue whether that is actually fair (personally, I do think AI is a high beta field). Topics that don't fall under this are regarded as inside baseball.
But obviously there's more to drawing people's attention than the individual skill or a comparable position at a different company. As you mentioned this top of HN ranking is driven by joining a trendy company, leading a hugely hyped product team (the Tesla automation stuff was on the front page yesterday), and a personal with a really hot skillset.
Combined of course with the usual luck and good timing.
Is it really hard to see how this isn't much more interesting than someone joining a realitively standard branch of Microsoft?
The comment up this thread holds true: human attention is not evenly distributed. That doesn't mean, however, that there's an imperative to "network" or build a "personal brand" – plenty of people gain a deep satisfaction from excelling at their craft.
If "make it big" just means a giant pile of money, there are plenty of millionaire pure technologists at Silicon Valley companies whos names are never told; the thousand or so that were created when Google IPO'd are basically unknown. Forbes had a recent article advertising Craigslist competitors, but reading between the lines, Craigslist has minted some of them, but they're entirely nameless among the wider population. If thats your definition of "making it big", then it's possible, but if you want broader recognition, I don't know that it's possible.
Maybe I'm being unimaginative, but outside of Steve Wozniak I can't think of any pure-technologists with household name recognition. The closest that comes to mind is Elon Musk, but unfortunately for you, there's plenty of marketing going on. I'd bet a large number of readers even here won't even recognize the name Vint Cerf.
Maybe you feel marketing is about lying, maybe selling yourself feels icky. However they're skills like any other; refusing to learn and use them would be like refusing to learn or use multiplication.
Read Sam Altman's praise of Greg (gdb) (http://blog.samaltman.com/greg) who is quite the gifted technologist, but the praise is for his dedication, on both technical and non-technical talent.
EDIT: Not saying these celebrities don't also earn their keep through their skills. It's just disappointing how much of a factor self-promotion is.
In a valley of smart and motivated people, discoverability will always be a challenge...though I don't doubt it's much more competitive now than ever.
There area millions of quiet, confident, competent people across industries. People who reliably turn out high-quality products and are well-paid for their work. They get on well with their colleagues and progress with their career at a decent pace. You just don't hear about this much. Doesn't this count as making it?
I'd say that the reason you hear more about people who are well-known is essentially just because they are well-known :)
It probably wouldn't work this way if people could wrap their heads around it.
The really question is, should we (as thoughtful human being as we consider ourselves to be) bother to question the trend (Which you are surprised that people are doing)? Or silently accept it?
That would be nice.
> it would appear that previous questioning has failed to have an impact.
Just because something does not cause a change, does not mean it does not have an impact. Maybe, the impact is that it is keeping things from getting worse...In this case, question like these may help to balance the influence of "trends" and helps us to maintain perspective...
If the alternative is phony politeness and masking reality under a guise of everything went great then I prefer this approach.
This is a great aspect of the software industry IMO. And if you want to get lots of job offers then build some great OSS projects like this guy. It's a great way to demonstrate your skill and attract a following which guarantees you job offers.
But I hadn't seen that Telsa released a similar statement, and that changes the context quite a bit to match what you describe.
That's not "begging the question" [1].
When Scott Aaronson wrote about moving to Austin, that post made the rounds here too.
Personally, I am aware of the two you listed + experimental, condensed matter, and astrophysics. There is some overlap between physics and EE, so I may be aware of others.
One rarely hears Dr. John Doe from Florida State University (or insert non-Standford university here) in Distributed systems has moved from Microsoft Research to NetApp. These are arbitrary names. The point is you rarely hear about people from other areas of CS outside of machine learning/universities outside of Stanford moving from one company to another. The field of CS is vast and there are multitude of practical and theoretical problems outside of machine learning that are worth looking into (ones that aren't currently considered hip or cool by the public).