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.