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by alephnerd·3y ago·view on hn ↗
It is not when it shows how people in Tech have a level of undue capital influence in America in the 2020s. This isn't the 1980s-1990s anymore (which was 30-40 years ago at this point) when nerds would be bullied for playing D&D or put in lockers.

Society has changed, and software engineering is viewed as the goto high paying job for people in my age demographic. And to be honest it makes sense - you make six figures, almost never go into the office, have the ability to travel all over the world working remotely, low working hours, intellectually stimulating work, etc.

And it's my cohort that plays a role in buying property and making everything expensive.

The archetype of programmer you mention still exists (hell, I don't program for a living anymore but I still mess around with kernel programming and OS dev) but are very much the minority now. Majoring in CS and CE is a fast track way to become a member of the 10% in American society so EVERYONE is trying to major in it.

2 comments
I find solace in the fact that most of these people will not "succeed"(by that I mean becoming respectable, competent engineers who will have good opportunities readily available to them). CS is hard; quite a large chunk of these sorts of people who enroll in bootcamps or try to major in CS end up dropping out or not pursuing a CS related job. Who knew that being genuinely interested in a subject helps in becoming good at it too.
Ehn maybe. I know some legitimately brilliant engineers who absolutely fucking hate code and once they grind up to staff, will nope to Engineering Management or Product Management.

I liked code but at some point, I got pissed off at ego driven "10x" engineers who couldn't be bother to explain in a non-combative manner how they architected their code base even though I was directly impacted by it. I realized weilding the mallet of "Profit and Loss responsibility" could get the assholes to shut up and let the rest of the engineers get unblocked.

Yeah I see your point, but is that a product of an unideal work environment or a lack of passion? Mabye even both to be honest.
> Society has changed, and software engineering is viewed as the goto high paying job for people in my age demographic.

This explains the influx of grifters and “MBA” types into the software industry along with the focus of software onto marketing junk, psychological manipulation, invasive ai, scammy digital coins, and scraping up people’s private data.