I think you are right. The money is moving towards tech and now the MBA crowd is looking to signal that they can code well enough to build products. I went to burning man about 5 years ago, it was already about money and status signaling more than counter culture. many of the people I met there were fairly successful tech people, they’re the ones who can afford it after all.

Did you work in banking in 2006? They partied at strip clubs and hired escorts for parties.

The sort of 'tech bro' you are describing already left tech years ago and moved to crypto

Truth is: nerds mostly remain nerds.

This is generally because low status or "unsexy" confers sufficient time to tinker, make recoverable mistakes and polish until the innovation gains traction. High status or "sexy" attracts all the wrong kinds of attention that brings all the wrong kinds of pressure that steals away that time.

I don't think there is any real backing to the idea that low-status people are more likely to succeed.

Point. They definitely aren't more likely to succeed. I do contend they are however, afforded a small opportunity to work on their idea in obscurity until it reaches that stage it can gain traction. And in the meantime, position their chess pieces for the inevitable entry of the avaricious, high-status people looking for a kill at the low-status people's expense.

That is, low-status can be deployed as camouflage to deflect attention away from the gathering of resources and information to choose the time, place and terms to start the fight for maintaining control over anything that gains traction.

I do agree however, this rarely happens.

Some of this other stuff just sounds like over excited college kids, like adderal and stuff?

The money is the relatively recent thing that made people practice for leetcode more that wouldn't necessarily go into software otherwise, but the algorithmic interview was there before tech started paying a lot and became the only growth engine of the american economy that is left.

Then people co opted the term to mean companies that paid well (wow the company with high stock growth pays more).

In regards to this Netflix was absolutely innovative in regards to engineering. They literally wrote the book on chaos practices. They also pay extremely high base salary ($400-600k).

Microsoft never paid well in regards to its peers.

Their subsidiary, Linkedin, beats most of Microsoft's peers.

Also GAMMA could be good: Google - Apple - Meta - Microsoft - Amazon

What does that have to do with nerds remaining nerds?

Theres definitely positions which the “slick MBA type” can fill in a tech company (PM, TPM, VP etc). But building, operating and reasoning about complex software systems is just hard and so demanding. It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.

Keep telling yourself that. What we do is soooo hard and special and we're soooo smart. There are plenty of smart people, and guess what - they used to go into harder and more demanding jobs in search of high pay.

Plenty of would-be bankers end up in tech, and plenty of would-be-could-be doctors end up in tech. Plenty of people who care more about success and money than twos complement are ending up in tech.

Investment Banking? Way worse hours, way worse culture. Medicine? Way longer hours, way more difficult road to a career.

Tech? Easy path (BS in CS is easy), than LC for a few weeks, and boom, you'll land a job - unlike medicine which takes a decade and 2 degrees. Most people can stop work after a 9-5, except maybe for on-call which IB and Medicine both deal with in their own way. Tech isn't nearly as dependent on networking and socializing as IB, which means way more smart people who want good pay can do it, even if they aren't born into a great professional network.

> It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.

Plenty of people aren't nerdy but are smart are filling up Silicon Valley and those open-offices across the country. Google's Operating System research teams? Probably nerdy. ACME Co's Random CRUD App team? Chill guy making a lot of money without knowing or caring about how compilers work, but very happy he can afford to visit Tahoe every weekend.

At my last FAANG job one of my coworkers didn't know what UDP or TCP were, and didn't care and wouldn't learn. Didn't want to learn about anything unless it was needed next sprint. He wasn't the best at his job, but he could do it just fine. Missed some opportunities to be more efficient by leaning on prior art and existing libs he never learned about, but got his work done and supported business goals. Parents told him to get a good job so he did.

I flip-flop every 6 months between thinking that everybody can do this and being absolutely floored that I myself can keep up with this.

One day we're writing HTML and CSS, and a few years later we're learning about the shadow DOM and why we may want to use React Native Web to run React Native on the web.

One day we're writing a LAMP CRUD app, and a few years later we're deploying a service mesh for resilience, visibility, and configurable networking - concepts that didn't even exist when we were writing CRUD apps.

I'm not a doctor/surgeon, but I don't think that the kind of work they do changes year to year at this pace?

I guess you could say that none of these concepts are really that difficult conceptually, but...what is...? Algebraic Topology? Chaos Theory?

I spent the last year migrating our backend off of heroku onto bare metal Proxmox servers with unlimited VMs. It blew my mind that 0, literally 0, of my developers took up my offer to give them free VMs (including KDE/Gnome with NoMachine/NX!!).

It turns out that my devs just want to be devs, and not use their free time to play on sys ops and k8s and ceph clusters.

When I saw this happen, I started hiring staff for sysops separately than expecting my devs to do so, and see much more clarity in output.

In summary, if you're writing the LAMP CRUD app, maybe someone else oughta be the one to deploy the service mesh.

I agree that it takes a certain way of thinking to be able to reason about strict logic and symbolic relationships. Just ask someone what (X or Y) equals when X and Y are both true. I knew people in my CS classes right up until the end that couldn't tell you correctly (because people in regular English think of "or" as "exclusive or" and its hard for some people to change their understanding).

I disagree with the concept about the rapidly changing tech jargon. I think in SF tech startup scene it may be that crazy, but once I start a job, I use their stack, and it stays that way for years. Different companies different stacks though. Big-Tech is even easier since they have their own custom stacks that are pretty stable.

> I'm not a doctor/surgeon, but I don't think that the kind of work they do changes year to year at this pace?

On the contrary. It changes all the time. They always have to be learning about new medication, new surgical techniques, new diseases. Ask a doctor in 2019 to diagnose the Sars-Cov-2019 Novel Coronavirus. Then ask them about ivermectin.

> I guess you could say that none of these concepts are really that difficult conceptually, but...what is...? Algebraic Topology? Chaos Theory?

I would say that real theory is actually pretty hard in CS. Math is famously unapproachable to people who don't "get it" and I think CS theory shares similar logical rigor - honestly similar to law and how it is a "different" logic than most people are ready for.

I know rocket scientists, and their classes were actually-intense math - but conceptually/logically easy IFF you could do the math. The basic biology of how a viral infection works is pretty straightforward (and taught to 13yo's), but again, thats not the hard part of the job of a doctor.

But most CRUD apps are not. And most people write CRUD apps. At my BigTech jobs, the company always had custom-in-house build tools that were great at doing deterministic reproducible builds and they were always based on strong theory and rigor and had white papers. But how many people actually have to do that at those companies?

Tech is poaching from academia and quantitative finance people -- not the normal professional careers because the type of thinking that is needed is very different from IB & law & medicine. It's not about hours.

I know plenty of doctors and lawyers and consultants and IB. The only people I know in other careers who I think could make it as well as the top tech workers have are people who are in physics and other STEM academia (my major) or quants who work for major market making firms (ie. Jane St, Citadel).

> ACME Co's Random CRUD App team

"ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.

You're over thinking this. I'm talking about high school and college students picking majors. I'm talking about what parents telling their kids to do. Immigrants moving to America picking a career to support their family.

No one quits Goldman Sachs's deal floor to work at Facebook. They skip the finance class and go to data structures freshman year. The alum they met at google are rich and happy and the alum from wall street are bitter and tired and overworked.

> the type of thinking that is needed is very different

Eh, its different but its not that crazy. Most of tech is not that hard. The harder part of being at a top firm anywhere is being generally successful enough to achieve the goal. The top few % of people that go to top school and go to top wall street banks or consulting firms or get into med school can do that.

> "ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.

You can replace acme with any tech company. You can work at apple making 300k and making a crud app. Tons of Silicon Valley companies are paying 300k+ for engineers and many of those engineers aren't solving problems that are particularly hard.

If you pay enough you will get a lot of focused, attentive, highly intelligent people. Accounting and law have never lacked for employees because they pay. Any industry that pays well enough will get good entry level people and if it continues to do well one day they’ll be that kind of person with 30 years of experience.

Worst of all, it has debased work. Idiots threw random dollar amounts on crypto memecoins and came out with hundreds of thousands. Degens gambled on memestocks and made millions. Anyone who did the "stable" thing of saving and investing wisely got left behind.

The worker shortage isn't just because people suddenly became lazier. They've absolutely debased money. And in the process, debased work. Why work hard when gambling and speculation and straight up lying ("hustling") are rewarded way, way more?

Anyone who thinks this is sustainable is delusional. And insensitive.

Maybe in some cases. Not on average [0]. Here is SF [1]

> Anyone who did the "stable" thing of saving and investing wisely got left behind.

Gambling has always been a thing. Lots of people lost big on crypto.

> Why work hard when gambling and speculation and straight up lying ("hustling") are rewarded way, way more?

If you actually think that, go ahead and make your millions. Efficient markets are not that easy. If you knew you could make more ahead of time, it would already be priced in.

I suggest spending less time hanging in communities and hearing people spitball and more time looking at the facts.

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SEHA [1]: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/san-francisco-ca

Home prices in my middle of nowhere Nebraska town are up 50% over the past decade. Rents too.

I don’t trust statistics saying “we’re not debasing the currency” from the very people who are currently debasing the currency.

Did not realize these claims were over the last decade... rents are up 37% on average, which is 15% more than we would expect with a standard 2% inflation.

And of course we return to the old HN bogeyman of shadow inflation. there are a number of independent academic researchers who track prices showing changes roughly in line with FRED cpi, but I'm sure those researchers are also part of the conspiracy.

This reads to me as someone who has been in tech since the 80s as a new way to put down the nerds now that they are actually not socially despised any more.

Thanks but no thanks.

- go to any working class area in San Francisco and tell them you work in big tech . See if you are not socially despised . Go tell anyone working blue collar jobs that you work in big tech in the Bay Area or Seattle and see if their reaction is not one of despisal.

That did not exist before unless I was living in a bubble.

This doesn’t have anything to do with being a ‘nerd’ or even “big tech”. It’s about housing costs and the result of NIMBYism from long term residents longing for the past.

People are going to move to the Bay, you can’t stop change. If you make it harder only the people with more money will be here which is what’s happening.

> Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you eternally wicked cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will be eternally wretched, cursed and damned. (OGM 1:7)

Well, now we have Web 3.0. It's the same type of people, creating new devices of gambling, cleaning out the laymen. Tired - NFTs, wired - Soulbound tokens.

So what are the tech and "BigTech" equivalents of broad market index funds like VTSAX held for the long-term starting in one's teens and dollar cost averaging out into bonds in latter decades?

You reminded me of this this article. I always struggled to find it until today. It's opening paragraphs warned about the same thing you talk about.

It's funny to read this now and see how they think about Bitcoin and Uber vs today

This. So so so well said

Think about things that are outright criminal, that breach the TOS on most websites, or that are wildly offensive or ridiculous. Being repulsive doesn't mean something isn't a counterculture; in fact, it can be sign that it is.

Illegal shows? Well dead city punx just had an illegal show in the LA river! Cops couldn’t even break it up. Streamed live on IG, lots of good advertising content.

All counterculture is mainstream, all of it is profitable with advertising. Burn a house down, riot about capitalism, at the end of the day you’re making a capitalist or mega corp money if someone can get the content from a device.

Want to truly be rebellious? Be boring and stop using social media.

This is today's counter-culture. Something like the final scene in 'Fahrenheit 451'.

Maybe in America

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

Sure people that thrived then are not thriving as much now, but it's a much more sustainably prosperous few decades since then.

Yes all the crypto/NFT can crash and burn but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.

Crypto is just a very expensive hobby/fad. It has no bearing on the overall economy. It could all go to zero and the affect on the rest of the economy and stock market would be small or minimal. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 have recovered far faster than bitcoin. Crypto generates no profits, big tech generates hundreds of billions of dollars of profit annually. Facebook alone makes $40 billion/year profit, about 3x that of Walmart.

Yes, the next crash won't be like 2008. The universe is infinite in its ability to present us with new forms.

These days it feels like they are straight up antagonistic towards the whole industry. A quick scan of The Verge homepage, I see mostly sarcastically negative stories (Netflix is finally taking a page from the rest of Hollywood) and neutral PR placements (Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered is coming to PC in August). As far as I can tell the only positive headlines are affiliate listicles (Here are the best tablet deals right now)...

More than watching tech go down, I think there's just a general anxiety that all basic business fundamentals have been turned upside down, and much of it is led by tech.

The markets are rallying right now because macro data is poor (which means Fed rate hikes might slow down). It's a bizarro economy and anyone who thinks long-term is understandably queasy.

Big tech companies have been absolute money making machines. What are you talking about?

Journalists first turned on Craigslist when they stole classified revenue, then they turned on Facebook when they stole advertising revenue. They started turning on tech as a whole as collateral damage.

The whole time they shat on wall-street for stealing everyone else's money and being rich. When tech got rich, they turned on them. First in the dot-com era when SF started to get corporate-ified and not counter cultural, and then everywhere when Tech became the new upper-middle class and linked (by journalists) with society's problems.

Tech is never not going to be among the best paying profession until governments regulate the industry into less profitability. If Google can make $millions per-employee by having a global reach, then there is no way to stop the salary creep compared to companies that only have local-reach.

People in tech also seem to forget that a lot of attention to tech is brought to them by the media. The first adopters are generally computer nerds and teenagers; people in media write about it, glamorize and make it mainstream (how many Tech CEOs have been on the cover of TIME magazine?). In fact, my personal perspective is that they haven’t been critical enough; when instagram and WhatsApp were gobbled up by Facebook the prevailing media sentiment was that of the unlimited possibilities in tech for wealth generation rather than concern about the anti competitiveness of the market that it caused.

Not sure about the US but over here in Europe there are billions of euros (probably tens of billions) that are poured right now into the market thanks to the latest EU Next Generation funds (basically post-Covid support money, in fact a typical keynesian move, with all its pluses and minuses).

There's a huge digitalisation push that comes from top to down, with actual money set up to pay for (almost) all of it. Add to it the the typical keynes-ian "accumulator" logic and things should be ok for at least the next couple of years for many computer programmers and IT people based in Europe, especially those that will get into contracting and will be able to land some part of the pie (a very big pie, as I've mentioned).

i sort of don't even know where to start with this one...

i'm going to just file it under every other "this time it's different" claim and move on.

watch out for CMBS imploding.

What we’re seeing instead is people fearing a repetition of the same mistakes and the same failures.

I mentioned CMBS which along with crypto are the fairly safe bets on what will meltdown this time, and they weren't involved (or didn't exist) last time.

The script also tends to vary. I was quiet surprised that the markets had a fit over the 1% fed funds rate and was caught a bit off guard.

They're announcing very directly though that they're going to invert the yield curve. They are quite concerned about wage inflation. They are more than willing to tank the economy to get it under control and are invoking the name of Paul Volker. There is no way we get out of this with a "soft landing" and things are going to detonate.

Then the fun really begins because the political climate is going to be much worse than 2008/2009. The Tea Party Republicans ostensibly claim to be against any kind of bailout and they'll be willing to play chicken with the entire economy in order to harm the Biden administration.

It is pretty obvious that it is going to be somewhat different this time.

The idea that policymakers will magically navigate us through these waters though harkens back to the Clinton/Greenspan era of policy. But we don't even have anyone like "The Maestro" running the show this time.

Wages are out of control and they're going to crash the economy to get them back under control. That's what they do. They haven't figured out anything magical to avoid the pain, and they always underestimate what kind of chaos it will cause.

i do wonder if that means that companies can get away with offering smaller compensation packages

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/07/amazon-boosts-max-base-pay-f...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/16/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-...

That said, as small-medium companies start crashing and burning, the megacorps that quickly ramp up hiring incentives will be in a pretty awesome spot in 5 years, as they'll have snatched up more great talent than their slower-moving competitors.

Didn’t mean pay would drop below a band but you’re likely going to be able to get away with the lower end instead of the higher end of a band if you’re perceived as “safe” in this market

the point is a flight to safety gives Megacorps leverage they didn’t have 1-3 years ago. they can pay you at the lower end of a pay band or interview you for a lower level than you asked for. and if people are desperate enough because they are in a tanking company or laid off they might take it.

And when everyone is thinking the same thing they can be pickier and get better quality talent for the same money regardless

Both companies are increasing their base pay precisely because employees like the assurance that their pay isn’t based on stock price.

For me personally, it would have taken a lot less work dealing with real estate if I could just have handed the bank my W2s with all cash compensation than having to deal with a 2 year prorated signing bonus and a 4 year vesting schedule.

Don’t you think that Netflix’s employees are kind of happy that their compensation is all cash right now?

Except for the few who foolishly chose to take their pay in cash + future RSUs instead of cash.

Both MS and Amazon announced they were increasing total compensation. Amazon specifically is slowly starting to weight cash comp over stock.

This same sort of article has been posted here a couple times in the past two weeks. Some news outlets seem incredibly eager to report this story

I feel like there's a certain sort of resentment from the news media towards the tech industry in general, and it's gotten worse in recent years. I think some of it is political, and some of it is out of fear because different outputs of the tech industry have radically changed other industries (e.g. cable TV's former monopoly on entertainment) and their success is dependent on their ability to maintain an online presence

This seems to have created inflation and it’s various seemingly negative consequences.

Financial crashes are often precipitated by short term factors eg inability to come up with enough capital, cascading failures as financial firms fail and spook all investors. The Fed has essentially acted more proactively to assure the market that it won’t let this happen.

If the fundamentals of the system are broken, there isn’t much even the fed could do. That doesn’t seem to be the case (modulo things the Feds cant control eg Foreign Wars).

So many people have lost so much money to ideas that rhyme with this one.