Re:Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?
by Karrot_Kream on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @08:46PM
(#31009956)
> Torvalds, James Gosling, Wozniack, Sergei Brin - those are nerd-nerds.
Remember that college educations, especially highly skilled STEM ones, were very rare for their parents' generation (born in the 30s - 50s)
Torvalds - Father was a politician, grandfather a famous statistician
Wozniak - Father was an engineer for Lockheed
Brin - Father a math professor, mother a NASA researcher
Gosling was the only one in this bunch who really just came out of nowhere. I agree with what you're saying about Nerd Nerds and All Birds Nerds but the founders of Silicon Valley were always well-heeled. I think the culture changed for rank-and-file engineers mostly because of the money in the field. While founders would certainly make it big (Moore, Gates, etc) the average engineer was payed well but not fantastically.
One could feasibly work in other white-collar fields (law, accounting, airline pilot, etc) to make similar money and those who were interested in the largest pay packages and large amounts of prestige went into fields like finance or medicine. Folks who went into tech typically chose tech because they liked the problems that you could solve in tech or liked the people who chose to go into tech (often somewhat neurodiverse). Nowadays tech salaries are insane and most people who enter tech are doing it for money and prestige foremost. These folks are going to be the All Birds Nerds; smart folks who are more interested in making money and rising the ranks rather than playing around with tech.
Remember that college educations, especially highly skilled STEM ones, were very rare for their parents' generation (born in the 30s - 50s)
Torvalds - Father was a politician, grandfather a famous statistician
Wozniak - Father was an engineer for Lockheed
Brin - Father a math professor, mother a NASA researcher
Gosling was the only one in this bunch who really just came out of nowhere. I agree with what you're saying about Nerd Nerds and All Birds Nerds but the founders of Silicon Valley were always well-heeled. I think the culture changed for rank-and-file engineers mostly because of the money in the field. While founders would certainly make it big (Moore, Gates, etc) the average engineer was payed well but not fantastically.
One could feasibly work in other white-collar fields (law, accounting, airline pilot, etc) to make similar money and those who were interested in the largest pay packages and large amounts of prestige went into fields like finance or medicine. Folks who went into tech typically chose tech because they liked the problems that you could solve in tech or liked the people who chose to go into tech (often somewhat neurodiverse). Nowadays tech salaries are insane and most people who enter tech are doing it for money and prestige foremost. These folks are going to be the All Birds Nerds; smart folks who are more interested in making money and rising the ranks rather than playing around with tech.