17 ms·

What happened to nerds?

• alpineman 3mo ago
  It became all about money. YC is actually really the epitome of this transformation. VCs started deploying massive amounts of money, turbocharged by Covid.
• cormorant 3mo ago
  I absolutely despised the game "Mafia" when my friends played it in college. Now I know I'm not alone in that.
• smallpipe 3mo ago
  That's incredibly disappointing from Moxie
• Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
  I think that the title should be more, what the fuck happened to tech executives as compared to nerds. because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy. It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D) As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it. With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook. So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift. BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZPdw&start_radio=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP... So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much) You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
  • fsflover 3mo ago
    Also, you can find a lot of nerds on Mastodon, PeerTube, and other non-mainstream, federated social media platforms that were not captured by the finance people (and cannot be thanks to their distributed design).
    • Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
      Exactly but because I suppose that the author is conflating tech founders on twitter (refuse to call it X) and other standard platforms which all share the same playbook and conflating it to all Although I would wish for less overlap with tech-bros but it is sadly what it is and there are ways to mitigate it by being on more nerd friendly websites like hackernews. Also, one more observation I wish to share is that not all nerds are tech product creators and neither should they be. Some just create for the sake of creation and IMO there is long way to go after creation as well and the nerd culture doesn't have standardized playbook as compared to grift culture. Basically the nerd culture is immeasurable and is driven by it and the grift culture is measurable and is also driven by it. It's just that tech has more overlap but if trillions of dollars were thrown in physics instead of AI (quantum computing?), I would consider physics to have a lot of tech-bro culture as well.
  • ElFitz 3mo ago
    > With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook. Reminds me of Pink Floyd’s "Have a Cigar": > And did we tell you the name of the game, boy? > We call it Riding the Gravy Train
    • srean 3mo ago
      And then Britney Spears albums out sold The Dark Side of the Moon
• piker 3mo ago
  It seems to me the role of venture capital has changed and is somewhat responsible for this. The obsession with MVPs followed by hyper-growth and then moat-building has warped our relationship with technology. It's driven by a desire for VC funds to "return the fund" with each investment, and increasingly, by a SoftBank approach which requires inundating the market leader with capital that forces out all competition. Technology has been financialized.
• negergreger 3mo ago
  Nerds used to have a internet to discuss tech in, you were allowed to make an argument based on logic and reasoning. Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history. Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
  • Sprotch 3mo ago
    I’d say everyone got on the internet, and it turned into the equivalent of your local bar for discussions
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • moffkalast 3mo ago
      Then LLM bots got on and it turned into an email spam folder.
      • Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
        That predates LLMs, but I get your point. But besides bots, there's also "low value" comments, the "who's listening in 2026" type comments. Undiscernable from a bot, adds no value, can be omitted and you wouldn't miss anything. And the worst part is that LLMs can generate more interesting comments than a large chunk of online people can.
  • dolia 3mo ago
    I feel that too many people are confusing arguments they agree with with logical arguments. Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with. I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
    • 3mo ago
• deleted 3mo ago
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• Grimblewald 3mo ago
  Great post, and largly captures my own experience. I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for. The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat). If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything? So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there. Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
• OgsyedIE 3mo ago
  Same blog from a different URL 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361 Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.
• TrackerFF 3mo ago
  Money happened. Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple. Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most. But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about. What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing. The money and power corrupted them.
  • eru 3mo ago
    Haven't quant jobs always been lucrative since the category had been invented?
  • FreddieSO 3mo ago
    100%. What matters most is always the intention of why a person does something. If it is based on external factors like money or power, and not intrinsic motivation like being fascinated or interested in new technology, this will happen.
  • JuniperMesos 3mo ago
    > What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing. > The money and power corrupted them. Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institution at all that could in principle have the capacity to do this would also have the capacity to become corrupt, at least by someone's judgement. Personally, I'm pretty happy with many of the sci-fi things that tech billionaire nerds have made their money by bringing into existence. I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
• Eufrat 3mo ago
  Silicon Valley has always had a bit of a libertarian bent, but I really think a lot of people have spent a significant and successful effort at pushing it towards Objectivism. Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves. Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
• comboy 3mo ago
  It's simple, marketing dominates everything. With attention being very expensive, appearance is what matters. It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here). It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.
• mykowebhn 3mo ago
  I think the issue boils down to money, lots of it. When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority. But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products". We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
  • ehnto 3mo ago
    > We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing. I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing. The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies. I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?
• f4stjack 3mo ago
  Nerds became an industry field - that's what it happened. Back in the 90'ies we were doing IT things because it geniunely interested us, not that it would "net us high salaries". I'd do this even if you didn't pay a single centa because it triggered my dopamine receptors. Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking. Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
• KingOfCoders 3mo ago
  Nothing, I'm here since the 70s and haven't moved.
  • st-keller 3mo ago
    So you are in a totally different place now :-)
    • KingOfCoders 3mo ago
      :-)
• juleiie 3mo ago
  Nerds were bought out and turned into money and thus wife having chads. Now, the basement dwellers of today are actually tech illiterate and skillless with no charming qualities at all. Blame capitalism.
  • traeame 3mo ago
    Seems illogical that you can quantify a subset of people that wouldn't even want to interact with the average joe on the clearweb. We're alive, intelligent and active on our IRC.
    • juleiie 3mo ago
      I know sites you have no idea about running on pure spite and strangeness. I am banned from almost all mainstream social media for wrongthink. What do you know about underground spaces? Hell, just few weeks ago we ddosed one of new text only social media sites for having a bad font. There is a real microcosm down there. And war. Don't go there. People would eat you alive for breakfast, doxx and possibly hack you as soon as you would start bragging about 'intelligence'.
      • guidostanislaus 3mo ago
        That must be very cool for you, I know a lot of stuff too, and yet.. I don't go around about it like poser. I am not interested in any further "intellectual" exchange.
• xlii 3mo ago
  You listen to the Radio Channel you picked. I understand the complaint, though it's like a complain that nerds featured in Cosmopolitan aren't as nerdy as they were. Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core. Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR. So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.
  • sublimefire 3mo ago
    Very much similar thoughts. The examples provided are not nerds, except a few. It is just tech is a lucrative path to make money and it attracts a variety of “interesting” personalities, specifically those that can captivate and persuade masses to invest in them. By all means tech is just a means to an end to such founders. A nerd is someone who is interested in tech for the sake of it, because it is beautiful, not because it will aid drones in killing targets more efficiently and not because it will land a great contract.
  • aoshifo 3mo ago
    I'd say, you are looking at this from the angle of a nerd. For you Elon or Sam are not (primarily) nerds because you know nerdier nerds (what you called very high-profile nerds). But for the general public Elon and Sam are very much the definition of a nerd. They have never heard of any of the high-profile nerds you know. And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
  • Freedumbs 3mo ago
    Does anyone consider Musk a nerd? He's more into marketing than GOOGL.
    • holistio 3mo ago
      Really? I heard @TeslaFan1337 saying that Tesla has a $0 marketing spend and it’s all about the engineering bravado Elon uniquely possesses.
• watwut 3mo ago
  What does any of that have to do with "nerds"? You are complaining about business and management people in tech. None of them is a "nerd" and never was. Or otherwise said, what does the "nerd" even means to you? I thought that nerd means a person who is a person with lower social skills, obsessed over technical details so much they are unable to discuss anything else. People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.
• zhxiaoliang 3mo ago
  The nerds era is gone. Welcome to the era of super-villains and self-entitled smartasses.
  • Leonard_of_Q 3mo ago
    Not gone forever though. There were nerds at the start of the industrial revolution, they were there when electrification happened, when radio became feasible, rinse and repeat to the most recent iteration of "computer nerds". A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds they're not really interested in creating large markets for their things. People with less eye for the detail but more for the market potential will pick it up, sometimes together with the nerds (Wozniak/Jobs), sometimes without them and create larger markets. If it really takes off like computers did there will be a wild-west period in which those who understand the technology - i.e. nerds - get to step out of the shadows for a bit until the technology is commoditised and the market is consolidated. Eventually there is less need to know the tech which has become 'boring' anyway so the nerds disappear into the shadows again to tinker with whatever scratches their itch. The market is like society in that it needs both conservatives who recognise a good thing and do their best to keep it alive as well as progressives who are less interested in keeping things going than they are in changing things in search of some Platonic ideal. While the good thing is good the progressives are doing their things in their workshops without being seen much. When the good thing starts going bad the conservatives are mostly ignored because nearly everyone is looking at the progressives for a solution which is not "a faster horse" or "a lighter buggy whip".
    • zhxiaoliang 3mo ago
      Yes, I agree that nerds still exist… I myself am one, LOL. But there are so much noise out there that our voices can no longer be heard. :(
• zhivota 3mo ago
  Elon Musk happened. Zuckerberg happened (yes, before the current bro transformation, we had The Social Network showing us). Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.
• louwrentius 3mo ago
  Nothing happened to the Nerds. They are all showing their true colours. They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity. The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world. 'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit. They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
• lukasm 3mo ago
  Once tech became glamorous, it started attracting people with narcissistic traits - much like Hollywood did. Expect to see more antisocial behavior as a result.
  • ferrouswheel 3mo ago
    We need a new unglamorous tech, massaging floating point quants by hand in a hex editor.
    • Hugsbox 3mo ago
      At least there's still plenty of places for real nerds to be nerds. HN, hanging around in IRC, Eternal September, among other places. Finding myself more and more drifting away from "mainstream" internet stuff, and as a result I'm finding a lot more engaging and thought-provoking things and am overall happier as a result.
      • lukasm 3mo ago
        any examples? Even HN became too business focus. Very little software engineering.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• thenthenthen 3mo ago
  “Tech Otakus Save the World!” Yes thats the official corporate motto and philosophy of the huge mobile game company miHoYo (creators of Genshin Impact). I live next to their HQ and had to look twice when seeing guys wearing tshirts with that slogan
  • sunaookami 3mo ago
    Their founding story is also very interesting, highly recommend reading it! Did you know that one of the founders (Liu Wei) personally did customer support in the early years? https://mihoyo.fandom.com/wiki/MiHoYo https://mihoyo.fandom.com/wiki/MiHoYo
    • thenthenthen 3mo ago
      Sure this story is bigger than Huawei, Xiaomi, BYD, Tencent etc. among ‘young’ Chinese (20-40). But prolly not here, thanks for sharing!
• parasti 3mo ago
  This seems to be a critique of "Can Tech Legends Find the Liar? (Mafia Episode 1)" on Youtube but critiqued from a "nerd subculture" angle, which is a thing in the USA, I guess? As a European, this took me a moment to figure it out.
  • Tade0 3mo ago
    There definitely is/was a nerd subculture in Europe, it's just that those who represent it were always only vaguely aware of the existence of Jobs and Wozniak. Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
    • Leonard_of_Q 3mo ago
      Jobs is not the one to think of when relating to nerds, Wozniak is. Jobs is the one who comes in and takes most of the money as well as the limelight when some nerds have done something interesting but then act like the dog who has caught the car. European nerd culture is more Fabrice Bellard and Linus Torvalds, less Steve Jobs.
• amarant 3mo ago
  Maybe identity is the root of all evil? Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense. We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist. I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well. (Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority) Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment
  • DanielHB 3mo ago
    I don't agree with Paul Graham on everything but he nailed this argument: https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html > If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. Of course one can't not have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.
    • amarant 3mo ago
      That was a great read! Thanks for linking it! Paul certainly has a way with words that I simply don't, and he expresses the same idea I had, only much more clearly. I wonder if being "engaged by identity" can be automatically detected somehow? Would be a cool experiment to build a automatic moderator that just hides identity based responses. Also makes me wonder if there's a reliable way to detect it in yourself? If I could reliably identify when my identity is engaged, that would seem to be the first step towards disengaging it. Or put differently, i would assume I carry labels unconsciously, in order to clear my cupboard I must find what's in it.
• sumitkumar 3mo ago
  This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium. Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status. Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant. Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.
  • Gud 3mo ago
    None of those categories were ever “nice”, wtf.
    • sigmoid10 3mo ago
      Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.
      • sumitkumar 3mo ago
        Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society. Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.
        • PaulHoule 3mo ago
          That’s a system though that seems to be at the breaking point.
• eklavya 3mo ago
  Almost like no group of humans is above the usual human vices.
  • TitaRusell 3mo ago
    Its a lot harder for poor or powerless people to have child sex orgies on yachts though.
• root-parent 3mo ago
  What happened to Nerds was HN started calling Musk an Engineer...and rockets he was developing...
  • smugglerFlynn 3mo ago
    To expand on this: certain people have learned how to capitalize on “nerdiness” - i.e. how to virtue signal in a way so that investors and general public treat you like an engineering genius. Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
  • sph 3mo ago
    The original sin is earlier, when people with a dream and a million dollars were dubbed Hackers. And then articles like these calls these Stanford and Harvard guys nerds. Have they ever seen a true computer nerd, you know, the type of people that can actually write code and are not just paying other people to?
• geremiiah 3mo ago
  What "charming personality", lol? Nerds always had a higher than average probability of being total assholes. That has always been my experience.
  • traeame 3mo ago
    Given your blatant generalisation, I simply believe you didn't pass the vibe check of that person and they would not want to have anything to do with you. Just how bullies detect nerds, nerds detect people who shun them, they just avoid conflict because it's a legit waste of time. Anyway, I got some important coding to do now.
    • shimman 3mo ago
      I'm a nerd that codes and I shun the vast majority of tech workers that continue to sell out humanity for a paycheck. Maybe take some time and consider the political economical ramifications of the industry because it has been a net negative towards humanity for a good decade+ now.
      • guidostanislaus 3mo ago
        It's impossible to shun anyone whilst being the minority.
• meindnoch 3mo ago
  They let in non-nerds. That's what happened.
  • Der_Einzige 3mo ago
    This but unironically! I normally hate gate keeping but in this one instance it’s all we have.
  • bluescrn 3mo ago
    Influencers, activists, narcissists, and grifters And then there were no 'safe spaces' for socially awkward/on-the-spectrum nerds. The spaces once created to escape the school bullies had let in new types of bully.
    • traeame 3mo ago
      The sociopaths tried to abduct my friends to a Discord-Server, but my true friend rebelled against them trying to take over my DnD round and he left, saying that he won't betray me for their cult. In the end the Discord people turned out to be deadbeats without a decent GM willing to do the hard work and their posse crumbled, probably preying on the next group of nerds/geeks/whatever victim they pick.
  • dennis_jeeves2 3mo ago
    You comment is probably one of the most important here. The gate keepers (generally the nerds) who produced useful products/services allowed the non-nerds in (to management), and from then on it's a slippery slope. You will see similar dynamics where a bunch of people are involved.
  • ai_critic 3mo ago
    This is such an obviously correct comment that I imagine it'll languish down below the fold. Playing off of it, the submission says something worth highlighting: > One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon. Luckey was perfectly happy doing VR at Facebook until he got shoved out over politics. It's not just letting the non-nerds in--it's a decade-plus long campaign to push nerds out if they have the wrong ideology.
• PeterStuer 3mo ago
  Who can forget the MeetUp crazed scene with mostly early 20 something tech startup cosplaying 'founders', mostly lounging and tweeting from their macbook seated on a brown leather couch in their exposed brick 'offices' with a pool table in the back?
  • Tade0 3mo ago
    I worked for a company which emulated this style. In fairness the exposed brick was already there when they rented the place.
• yumraj 3mo ago
  LinkedIn, Twitter and tons of money
• keiferski 3mo ago
  I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior. They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group. “What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
  • Neil44 3mo ago
    "I identify as a nerd and think I'm virtuous, therefore other people who identify as nerds should be virtuous in order to validate me"
    • keiferski 3mo ago
      Yeah maybe it’s just me, but the whole idea of “identifying as a nerd” seems so silly, something out of a bad high school movie. Can’t we just be adults interested in different topics and hobbies?
  • TitaRusell 3mo ago
    Virtuous people become doctors, social workers or kindergarten teachers. People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
    • TFNA 3mo ago
      It's hard to claim that the initial generation of Free Software developers in the 1980s and 1990s weren't virtue-minded people. The issue isn't spending one's entire life in front of a computer, it's being outcompeted by people who do the same but with mercenery aims.
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• AussieWog93 3mo ago
  Interesting that he mentions Elon as being the archetypal "phase 3" nerd, since he was fairly high profile in all 3 phases and his reputation during the "phase 1" and "phase 2" timelines pretty much matched the author's description of the archetypal founder from those periods too. I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
• fnord77 3mo ago
  > A short history of how tech leaders went from charming nerd to terrifying overlord did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord
• edu 3mo ago
  Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
  • srean 3mo ago
    Do dupe's get necessarily de-ranked ? If it has active participation in the form of new comments, it makes sense to merge the comments and not penalize the post.
    • altairprime 3mo ago
      If you email the mods and ask them to do so, they’ll either agree or let you know why they didn’t. I don’t have a solid enough grasp on how their logic works to predict the outcome here.
      • srean 3mo ago
        > Dupe's It gets tiring to watch over autocorrects <sigh>
  • palmotea 3mo ago
    > Discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361 That post: > 140 points by mrmarket 3 days ago | unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite | 110 comments This post: > 626 points by vrnvu 8 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 431 comments IMHO, it's not a dup, because it's getting a lot more traction today.
    • dang 3mo ago
      The previous thread was only on the frontpage for 30 minutes so we can let this one stay up. (I've taken "the fuck" out of the title - we don't care about profanity per se but that bit is a little linkbaity in this case.)
• jmyeet 3mo ago
  What happened? Tech companies became trillion dollar companies and tech founders became billionaires. As a trillion dollar company, you are a military contractor and are deeply invested in and intertwined with the American imperial project. Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there. Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
• einpoklum 3mo ago
  A post complaining about the spectacle of tech CEOs media image, rather than people's real lives.
• matwood 3mo ago
  Once people get rich and gain power, they do everything to grow and maintain their wealth and power. It's a tale as old as time.
• samsartor 3mo ago
  The premise of this post is that tech founders used to be admirable nerds, but have since changed. I wonder if it isn't the other way around. We're the nerds. Us. Here. We used to admire tech founders because sometimes they were nerds too, but then we changed. We grew up. We got wise to it. The author wants founders to stop projecting “an obsession with wealth and power” and instead “focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values”. And maybe it doesn't occur to them (as a fellow nerd) that _wealth and power were the whole point_. The author enjoyed being blind to the greed of it all, and now being unable to unsee they are begging the founders “please please just pretend a bit better”.
  • sdevonoes 3mo ago
    Nah. I think you got it wrong
• andai 3mo ago
  >Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.) If you're a visionary, by definition you see what others do not. Which means that there's a lag between being right and being seen as right. That lag looks like arrogance. Of course, the trick is how do you tell the difference from the outside? I used to think "be right about everything all the time" would be enough, but I've seen it fail constantly for myself and for others. Now I think it boils down to "some people will decide to love you and some will decide to hate you, based mostly on tribal affiliation[0] -- how much will liking him cost me socially? -- and how often you've been proven right actually has very little bearing on the situation." [0] Also apparently your spinal posture matters a lot more than what you're saying. Crucially both are social-emotional, not logic-based.
• etempleton 3mo ago
  I miss Jobs. He was the one all these tech founders wanted to be. And Job, for all his faults always really cared about the product he made. I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
• roncesvalles 3mo ago
  This is looking back at Apple through some very rose-tinted lenses. Apple had a big role in moving the tech industry toward "grift-adjacent". There were at least 2 contiguous decades when Apple products were unusable, poorly designed, self-important, overpriced pieces of junk. Some would argue they still are. People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a "not-a-flamethrower" if he tried to sell one.
  • nixon_why69 3mo ago
    I don't like Apple products really but 2 contiguous decades is a bit much? The first mac was good, os x when it first came out was phenomenal, and there aren't 2 decades in between there.
    • roncesvalles 3mo ago
      OS X was never good and still isn't. I need to install like 7 third-party usability tools to make myself productive on a Mac, including a tiling manager, a clipboard manager, and a not-broken replacement for Spotlight - very basic things. Also, Steve Job's "font obsession" is overrated. The fonts on Windows have always been much better and render way better as well (even to this day). Helvetica Neue is widely considered one of the worst fonts and Apple used it for a whole 3 decades.
      • nixon_why69 3mo ago
        You can certainly say that now, but in 2000, a Unix with a polished desktop really was amazing imo. Agree to disagree I guess.
• alkyon 3mo ago
  Invoking LOTR analogy, Woz would be Tom Bombadil of the industry. Musk, Altman & Thiel, on the other hand, quite the opposite.
• 4ggr0 3mo ago
  > Moxie Marlinspike come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better. that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...
• internet_points 3mo ago
  Putin is right now considering how to get on that Mafia show and improve his public image in the US
• alsetmusic 3mo ago
  I remember one of my first interactions with someone when I got to one of the big companies. I thought, “He’s a nerd!” It was both joy and surprise. We had the same speech impediment. We were both nerds. The job was hell, but everyone cared a lot. I don’t give a damn about any company’s goals now.
• pjmlp 3mo ago
  We got old, slowly approaching retirement age, and now what is cool is being that guy or girl on Silicon Valley show, naturally with VC backing hoping to win the startup lottery.
• latexr 3mo ago
  > He and DH Hansson have retained the nerd-dom that made tech interesting/fun/curiosity-driven/charming for an audience with a certain taste in the first place. With them, it at least 'feels' like what you see is what you get. That does wonders for your reputation. Doesn’t seem like you’ve been keeping up with DHH’s reputation. He’s at best controversial. He has publicly expressed fervent views about subjects outside tech that were definitely not fun/curiosity-driven/charming and has gotten plenty of backlash. I also see no reason to believe he’d decline to be on that Mafia game, he feels as much a “personality” as the others.
• aborsy 3mo ago
  Companies such SpaceX are not built primarily by CEOs, rather by thousands of engineers, staff members, and state and private funders. Many of them are top graduates of best universities in the world. CEOs play important role too, of course, but they work as hard as engineers. It’s a scam: people like Musk take credit for the work of thousands of people and even states. It’s ridiculous that a few people capture the value commonly generated. We can go back to decades of public funding of research and development through taxes at universities and other public institutions, that’s a separate post.
  • deleted 3mo ago
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• amai 3mo ago
  This blog looks AI generated to me.
• cs02rm0 3mo ago
  They're still around, even if Musk is excluded. Torvalds springs to mind pretty quickly. I think society is increasingly adverse to people having personality flaws, than it is in favour of people having strengths such as technical knowledge or ability. Better to have a bland guy running McDonalds who can't stomach eating the "product" than some passionate chef doing his best to improve mass market food but rubbing people up the wrong way. It's failure of capitalism if the money goes to the guy in the shiny suit instead of the person, or team, who can actually innovate. I don't want to be too melodramatic, but maybe this is all part of the fall of the empire.
• steveBK123 3mo ago
  > Ten years ago, the cultural idea of the technologist was still basically Jobs and Wozniak. Nah, that's been dead since 2010 or earlier. It was probably dead during DotCom too. Anytime tech is hot again, it attracts the kind of money/status chasers that move to whatever is hottest. I mean Zuck was a Harvard grad and Bezos was a hedge fund guy first. Thiel was in law and derivates trading before tech. The founders in garage era was more 70s/80s vibe.
• jappgar 3mo ago
  Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg were two nerds on either side of the privacy spectrum in the twenty-teens. One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire. The message was received. We now only have the Zuckerberg type.
  • deleted 3mo ago
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  • OhioMan2943 3mo ago
    Nym vpn and its community show the outside the system tech spirit still lives on
  • tantalor 3mo ago
    > on either side of the privacy spectrum Oh how quickly we have forgotten: > We plan to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case -- messaging -- make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services. March 6 2019; https://web.archive.org/web/20190306191516/https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-privacy-focused-vision-for-social-networking/10156700570096634/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190306191516/https://www.faceb... Of course, none of that happened. But he did make a big fuss about it.
  • dooglius 3mo ago
    I don't think Assange was overly concerned with privacy, transparency was more his wheelhouse.
    • par 3mo ago
      potato potatoe
  • ajam1507 3mo ago
    If Julian Assange had taken his privacy principles and built a social network instead of leaking government secrets things might have turned out differently.
• dofm 3mo ago
  1) Incredibly large amounts of money 2) Gamergate
• Aldipower 3mo ago
  [dead]
• Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
  TLDR, "Yoink" =3 Patrick Boyle seems to cover the SPCX trajectory fairly well... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXgeNwNRJ4
• general1465 3mo ago
  Bullied in their childhood, they will reflect the cruelty back on the society once they get into position of power. You reap what you sow.
• api 3mo ago
  Nerds are no better or worse than other people. Dump massive money and power into an industry and you will get unhinged shit like this that bubbles to the surface. Some of it is the mask falling off and some of it is people genuinely getting warped by it. It’s a little of both. In finance it’s covered over by a buttoned down ivy league veneer, but the coke snorting maniac is there. Same in politics where there’s pomp and ceremony to cover it, but when it comes out in the open there it’s probably the most ugly. Governments have armies and police. In nerd-dom it comes in a form that’s uniquely tone deaf to the point of coming off like a comic book or anime villain.
  • traeame 3mo ago
    Nerds never went away, they just migrated to Signal chats or obscure IRC channels. Non-interaction beats bad interaction by miles.
• smugglerFlynn 3mo ago
  > Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant What is it, exactly, which inherently separates Job’s behavior from Altman’s? I’d argue that both rely/relied on available publicity, marketing and VC management tools of their era. > Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth Tech co-founders like Woz are still out there, so cherry picking to paint a different picture and widely generalise immoral wrongdoings / lack of nerds in certain companies management structures to the whole industry does not help. I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago. Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.
• RaSoJo 3mo ago
  Apart from Woz, I don't consider the rest of the individuals as nerds at all. Those are loan sharks in the garb of nerds. Capitalizing the work of others, Cannibalizing smaller entities, creating monopolies, controlling the government and the narrative.
  • lioeters 3mo ago
    The way of Woz is how you earn the respect of fellow nerds. The way of Jobs is how you "earn" a billion dollars.
    • datsci_est_2015 3mo ago
      I prefer the term “extract” in place of “earn” in this context.
    • tim333 3mo ago
      Though Woz did ok there.
  • oxag3n 3mo ago
    Looked for this comment! All those C*Os and founders are good and successful politicians, not nerds. There was a colossal PR campaign to picture them as nerds for multiple reasons, but most of them never created like nerds would do (with a passion, going deep, enjoying the process & the result). Politicians become successful due to skills incompatible with nerd mindset. Look at Linus, he could built an empire but he's a git.
• ph4rsikal 3mo ago
  Increasingly men have been disenfranchised over the last decade so the only way forward is to take on such titles to at least appear successful. It looks like normal behaviour to me.
  • lojban 3mo ago
    Could you elaborate? In what ways have men been disenfranchised?
    • ph4rsikal 3mo ago
      For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent). https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/ https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
      • lojban 3mo ago
        27 percent is roughly the same percentage of white men that are in that age bracket in the US. The lower 21 percent in the humanities could be explained by there being less interest in the those fields from the white male population in the first place. I wouldn't call that disenfranchised; I'd call that a correction. I suppose you could make the argument that more white men should be incentivized to go into the humanities though.
        • ph4rsikal 3mo ago
          You only say that because you benefit from it.
• curldevnull 3mo ago
  Things like ycombinator and their censorship, they all went someplace else.
• maxaw 3mo ago
  >why are they doing this?? [the mafia game show] Instantly thought of the big short: “they’re not confessing. They’re bragging”
• summa_tech 3mo ago
  It became obvious / accepted wisdom that a moderately successful startup exit is the only way to have a decent future as a living person. This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia is dead thanks to overly competitive publish-or-perish set-up (probably the biggest loss of the three), (b) corporate jobs do not pay enough to safely survive downturns that leave you jobless for extended periods, (c) government jobs have been made even more onerous and even less paying in real terms. So everyone has to become a self-promoting, trend-chasing startup-founder type. Even if you don't found a startup, you have to be always ready for a new "business opportunity".
• IshKebab 3mo ago
  Come on, are you really complaining that they played a game of Mafia? Please.
• jameshart 3mo ago
  This is one of those sampling bias/availability heuristic problems. Of course the ‘nerds’ you hear about and see online are extroverted self-promoters. Of course the most visible people in the internal culture of large organizations are the ones who do more talking than doing. Those are the people who are doing all the talking. It is a massive over sampling problem that leads you to think, by looking at eg LinkedIn, ‘why is everyone on here writing engagement-bait algorithm-maxing posts?’ Everyone is not; The content you see is by definition the content that maxed its algorithmic exposure.
• amelius 3mo ago
  Nerds have made themselves obsolete by inventing LLMs. So now instead of programming it makes more sense to go to the gym.
• GlibMonkeyDeath 3mo ago
  "The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it's not purely tech's fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally" I am not so sure I agree with this take. The "nerds" are building incredibly powerful technologies (Amazon, Starlink/SpaceX, search, algorithmic social media, AI, etc.) that literally control our lives now. It isn't any great mystery that the tech titans realized they had this power, and hence are questioning whether democracy is some outdated concept. They all want to be Plato's philosopher (or in this case, technologist) kings. At the risk of sounding like an AI, it isn't just grifting (or a con game) - these guys really do think of themselves as the new feudal lords. So I don't think this author is thinking big enough...
• inigyou 3mo ago
  Nice shadow marketing for Kagi in there, linking to a Kagi image result page that asks you to sign up to view it, instead of the image.
• bentt 3mo ago
  It really changed when the game went from "Build the best product" to "Get the highest valuation" and the means of doing so were specifically NOT about building the best product. VC money was a factor, public exits were a factor, but even more generally, the idea became that you could become a billionaire without making anything at all. Just create enough FOMO among the monied and you win. This is not nerd stuff... it's psychopath stuff.
  • ncr100 3mo ago
    Yes - Psychopathy is a thing, last time I researched, in the CEO territory. I assume it is selected for. I assume it benefits those at the tippy-top of the western corporate structure. They make more money, taking advantage of situations that squish other people, in my view more quickly than those with fewer pathologies. In my personal experience they seem to be tacitly accepted by boards & investors. I understand "maximizing profits" is the job. Not a new thing. - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-many-successful-millionaires-are-psychopaths-and-why-it-doesnt-have-to-be-a-bad-thing.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma...
• arkh 3mo ago
  > Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent. I'm gonna disagree on the timeline and maybe get some flak for it: phase 3 was 1995-2000ish. When the first advertisement script and web analytics were born and disseminated. That's where all the tech grifts originate.
• kasey_junk 3mo ago
  The gentle nerd trope was always a lie (as all tropes were). For every woz you’ve got some egotistical anti-social nerd deriding “bean counters” and “sales guys” because of some deeply held problems dealing with the outside world (especially women). If you haven’t met someone who is rude and inconsiderate and thinks that’s ok because they believe they are way smarter than they are, then you haven’t worked in tech. This sort of archetype navel gazing is appealing because you can cast any story you want that way. Buy it doesn’t actually help to understand the complex problems we face, it just lets you blame some “other”.
  • Der_Einzige 3mo ago
    If a critique of bean counters is coming from incels, I hope that a lot more men stop having sex. By your logic, the more men have problems with women, the better society will become. A lot of society is actively fucked up by hyperoptimization, especially in business.
• TheServitor 3mo ago
  Jobs is a hack who promoted rampant consumerism and e-waste backed by slave-like manufacturing conditions. People need to stop putting him on a pedestal as separate from other Big Tech founders. He's just the flavor of egomaniac that appealed to your personality.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• rigonkulous 3mo ago
  Nerds were commoditized by Hollywood, who exploited the rising digital era to develop stereotypical caricatures which could be easily pigeon-holed, and thus controlled. They were compelled to do this, because nerds ate Hollywoods' lunch. Just look at the show, Big Bang Theory. A heinous exposition of nerd culture which derides and degrades nerd'ism and aligns it with the neo-fascist Ayn Rand'ian ideology being propagated by Hollywoods' culture class in order to promulgate division and derision. The Wests' copycat culture, not really able to develop culture of its own, simply picked up the baton and ran with it. Now, gullible impressionable generations assume - courtesy of incessant mass-media groupthink - that its necessary to be a misanthropic asshole if you want to sound clever.
• OhioMan2943 3mo ago
  Also- everyone is a whore now, and not in the fun literal way.
  • cindyllm 3mo ago
    [dead]
• OhioMan2943 3mo ago
  This sounds insane to say but... does anyone else get the feeling this comments section is being subtly astroturfed to sabotage the spirit of good-willed idealism and innovation? Look closely, there's reasons the powers that have insane capital would do this. They've done it to every other space already.
• locallost 3mo ago
  Did someone mention Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy yet? It's not one organization, but there's just so much money in tech and it's so mainstream, that it just attracts more people that want to be successful not as a byproduct of skill, but just on its own. This bit me recently when changing jobs, I underestimated that despite all the problems I had, at my previous job there were a lot of people prioritizing being good at their job. Now it's just kicking the can so it's someone else's problem.
• baggachipz 3mo ago
  This is the era of unbridled, shameless narcissism and tech is no different. Money and publicity are excellent vehicles for the narcissist.
• moomoo11 3mo ago
  because 400k TC plus attracts people who optimize for earning high TC and not necessarily being “passionate” about the actual tech. i’d say it’s worse for founders. i barely see any nerdy founders anymore in sf. it is all striver types whose parents are execs or other wealthy types, and all these people want to do is rent seek or attention seek instead of making something interesting. so many of their ai products don’t even work. the entire goal is to get suckers to pay for a few months or sign a contract to lock down “$insaneAmount arr in six months” and then blow the VC money on yacht parties and other lame stuff.
• lenerdenator 3mo ago
  The money got big, and no one stops them from doing these things. It's not particularly difficult to understand. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the results." - Charlie Munger.
• altairprime 3mo ago
  The missing piece of data that distinguishes what happened to nerds and to finance bros is that nerds got sold on post-religious cults like Landmark, The Secret, or the metastasized principles thereof (see also Silicon Valley s01’s guru, the marketing for Devs, the documentary The Institute, et al.) — but finance bros were insulated against this because their employers and industry had rigorous belief systems already in place centered around money, profits, and self-confidence; and, most importantly, a much higher tolerance for arrogance. So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without. There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory. To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the needy), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!) Most nerds lacked both the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Jobs against the belief grifters and the innate confidence that insulated Woz, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others. Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).
• kelvinjps10 3mo ago
  I think people should stop worshipping and stop putting them in a pedestal. Yeah even steve jobs
• intended 3mo ago
  Oof, the section on the founders fund mafia video pointed out things I hadn’t realized about the degree of planning behind it.
• rurban 3mo ago
  All fine and dandy, until I found out how others talk about us nerds. When I was interviewed once on TV (about some sports I was representing), the TV folks constantly joked about me as the "pulli-guy" (guy wearing a pullover). You are certainly not considered serious, if you just don't dress like them. Or talk like them.
• ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
  [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
• simianwords 3mo ago
  > Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent. The digital commons of 2026 is defined by its grifters. So it's not purely tech's fault that its now seen as a sort of avenue for getting rich quick and amorally, even if you are an otherwise ordinary person. But it is our fault that many of our 'figureheads' are leaning way the hell in on this. Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this, but he almost doesn't count because he is in his own tier of ridiculously self-promotional and attention hungry. There's a new trend to call everyone you don't like a "grifter". How is Elon a grifter? The dude has been getting shit done on and on for years. This is the opposite of grifter. > One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon Also what is this? Wasn't the whole point to have an agreement to not build AI weapons? I think the author is on some emotional screed.
  • Zigurd 3mo ago
    Boring company was an anti-mass transit grift. Dogecoin. Humanoid robots as the future of Tesla. Colonizing Mars is a grift on unmatured boys who grew up on scifi. Etc. Which is to say: you really couldn't remember any grifts?
• yifanl 3mo ago
  The ones who were good at becoming rich became rich. The ones who weren't were punished for not becoming rich.
• cormorant 3mo ago
  When I first heard of "Hackers" being equated with startups (viz. this very forum's name!) I was disgusted. A hacker, to me, was personified by Richard Stallman, or a phreaker, or Neo from the Matrix. But here we are.
• afavour 3mo ago
  The fate of many nerdy interests: you want it to become popular and widespread. Then it does, and you realise you've lost control of it and it becomes commoditised. So went comic books, goes tech.
  • aranelsurion 3mo ago
    Damn, I remember playing games in 90s instead of watching TV like my classmates, and daydreaming one day I’d be able to talk about games instead of what was on the TV yesterday. Now everyone plays, watches or at least knows games, but most games are lowest common denominator focus group tested commodity crap. Huge budgets and production value, almost zero innovation. Even indies are 80% slop to make a quick buck. If you have a hobby no one cares about, hold it dear and close to your chest, and be happy that no one cares about it.
    • mountain_peak 3mo ago
      > If you have a hobby no one cares about, hold it dear and close to your chest, and be happy that no one cares about it. Yes and yes. I've often likened [unpopular] hobbies these days to how Joel tries to hide Clementine deeper and deeper into the recesses of his mind to try and avoid his memories of her from being erased in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". He fails, but somehow, they find each other and start again.
• stevenhubertron 3mo ago
  I think it started with “developers developers developers” and kids went to colleges for CS degrees to get rich not to solve problems or geek out on hard problems but to get wealthy. That dropped in a lot of new personalities some of which were highly narcissistic.
• Mezzie 3mo ago
  This is going to be buried, but I'll say it anyway. I've been thinking about this a fair amount over the past 5-10 years, and I think a lot of the issues that we have can be traced to our demography and specifically 'the zeal of the convert' along with existing cultural dysfunction that would have been addressed if we'd grown more slowly as a group. There's a lot of discussion about tech as an industry, but much less about tech as a culture, encompassing people's lives outside of their work/career. Most people who are into tech in their 40s-60s came into it via a strong interest as an adolescent or young adult, and a fair number of them felt misunderstood and/or were abused/taunted/bullied/etc by mainstream culture. Then they discover this part of the world where people think like them and things make sense. They make friends who see things in systems! They can argue with facts! They agree what is important to argue about! They agree that consistency in thinking principles matters! Etc. This means a lot of people in tech, particularly the ones who hold the most power (even outside of founders) are decently likely to have either a disdain of or fear of non-tech cultures due to bad experiences, feel that tech culture needs to be defended from outside influences who don't understand and would crush it, and are well... zealots about it. The problem is zealots are really bad at accepting and pinpointing issues within a culture. They want to defend it beyond all reason because to them, that culture/group is their safe place. If someone is bad in the culture, it can't be a sign of something wrong with the culture (because the culture is a safe place). Instead, that person 'isn't a true X'. Or that person is just a bad apple. The other influence is that converts absolutely don't want to lose their place. In the case of tech culture, because we've intertwined the culture with a career, that means people being afraid of losing their career/network/etc. This is a different than being born into something. The perspectives are different. People born into tech culture/grey tribe/however you want to label it get to see more of how the culture expresses itself in different relationships (including its problems). They see disagreements between nerd adults that aren't mediated with corporate or monetary power/status structures, they have a choice about how much of the culture they participate in or not (like how someone born Catholic who goes to Mass once a year at Xmas is still considered Catholic regardless). There's more wiggle room, and more a sense of how those virtues play out over an entire lifetime instead of being limited to how they're expressed in a workplace between the ages of 20 and 45. Depending on the particular situation, it's also possible to have someone in tech culture who doesn't hold any personal grudges against the other cultures they share space with. Right now, since we're dominated by converts between the ages of 20 and 50 and we've grown so quickly, we haven't had the time to create the cultural guardrails that would allow us to do things like 'agree on what constitutes an abuse of power' or 'agree on what we should teach our kids about morals', etc. And because of the lopsided age pyramid, we have next to no elders, which doesn't help either. This is shifting slightly as the first generation of explosive growth is starting to reproduce, and soon they'll start aging out of the workplace and we'll start to see more contemplative behavior. It's already somewhat starting: there's hints of people reaching that stage in their lives. (NB: Yes, I'm aware that the tech industry pre-dates the 80s, but demographically those numbers are minuscule in comparison to the people who joined during and after the dot com boom. My grandmother used punchcards and knew C and was born in 1934, but there just aren't enough people with that experience for them to exert a cultural pull. Almost all of the elders we do have are regarded individually: we know (or know of) those people, but that's different from 'I'm struggling with this moral question, I'm going to go ask John because he's both wise and will understand what I'm talking about enough to give decent advice'.)
• otikik 3mo ago
  Money
• thraway3837 3mo ago
  the technology industry spent forty years accumulating a very specific kind of trust and mostly had boring motives, which made us appear trustworthy and largely benign Are we on the same planet? Trust and motives? Is this some kind of secret that we’re not supposed to talk about? Tech, from its very beginnings, has been about libertarianism, subversion, counter culture, trying to be cooler than the people, wanting to wield power over them, misogyny, abusing free speech, racism, gatekeeping. The list keeps going of so many bad characteristics. “core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility” Again what planet is this? Most nerds are some of the most self important condescending better than you social weirdos. Ohhhh yes. Here it comes “occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.” Ah yes applauding arrogance as correctness. Phase One. Holy. The delusion here thinking that 1970-2007 was some golden CEO age. Do you live your life never understanding the incredible pain and exclusion and mistreatment that people experienced and continue to everyday? Is that by choice (willfully ignorant) or are you just this privileged that you thought the world was fantastic? Here’s the fact: These CEOs, SVPs, Directors, Managers, Engineers didn’t just magically become shitty people in recent years. They’ve always been terrible people right down to the no-social-skills neckbeard who manages IT. This has always been the case. Might I remind you that computing was full of women? That’s how it started. What did boys do? They came in, kicked all the women out. Took over and then invited their buddies. It gets worse because then it also became racist. This was never a surprise. The root cause was that terrible people came in and ….. SURPRISE …. behave terribly. This is some of the most delusional and downright offensive stuff I’ve ever read and I don’t even want to begin to read some of the HN comments. And HN has had far worse discussions and articles on the front page. Most of us have never experienced the depressingly (yes actual clinical depression) horrible treatment that people have been experiencing either as potential employees or full time employees ever since those ENIAC days. Go look at your team. And then look at your other teams. And then your line of management. You’ll see the pattern. Now go back and look at history for the same things. You’ll once again see the same thing. It’s the same people. Young terrible hateful xenophobic racist homophobic freaks grew up and continued their ways. Nerds being the good guy is as cringe as the incel nice guy. Yuck. Our industry is rotten because it has rotten people all through the ranks. It’s not just CEOs or founders. It’s everyday working people who are terrible to each other. And sorry to say but nerds geeks whatever you want to call them are at the top of the most terrible. That’s what make this industry suck. We never actually sat down and told most of these people (and us) to goto a therapist and deal with our trauma, demons, etc. and stop propagating that hurt to others. Start there. Oh and this is the same blog with a different URL from 2 days ago and commenter pointed out. Yikes.
• jschveibinz 3mo ago
  Wow, this comment section alone speaks to how much things have changed. As someone who started to read this forum because it was y-combinator startup-friendly, business-friendly and investor-friendly, I never would have imagined the anger and ridicule on display here. Obviously, the nerds have left the building--or at least this forum. Did anyone read this article? "There is no reason founders should disappear from public life. There are too many advantages to building in public to ignore it." Someone has to say this: don't be a victim--get out there and build something valuable for yourself. There are no overlords, except in your imagination. Go build great things.
  • galangalalgol 3mo ago
    I think the ire is from people who were nerds pre 2000. Before software was a way to wealth. People who made weird stuff because they wanted to. Then some of those people made weird stuff that made them wealthy, leading some people to make boring stuff that made them wealthy. Then the phrase startup started being common and people entered the field with wealth on their mind. It is the complaint you would hear from any niche career if suddenly it became lucrative. Your advice is solid though. Ignore all those people and keep making weird stuff that you love without worrying about whether it will pay for more than food and shelter. Not with you on the overlord thing though, there are plenty of people looking to control, oppress and pull up ladders.
• dfedbeef 3mo ago
  > This will probably catch on slower and be less viral, but it will pay off in the long-run once people 'turn against' tech founders as reality stars, which they eventually will. The whole problem with opening Pandora's box is that you don't get to close it if you don't like what came out. Why would things eventually get better? Especially on a time scale that matters to anyone who is currently alive?
• sigbottle 3mo ago
  The mafia game aspect is something I had not thought of. Have science fiction / dystopian novels focused on propaganda like that? Novels seem to have cartoonishly evil societies but the real world has stuff like this.
• harrall 3mo ago
  It’s not a “nerds” thing. Most CEOs are completely private. Most people don’t post their thoughts on Facebook on random topics either. Because when most people post all their private thoughts on matters publicly, it’s kind of embarrassing.
• paulsutter 3mo ago
  > Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent... Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this Elon? Grift? Give me a break. He's the greatest true technologist of all time. I couldn't fine even one other defender in either discussion. Maybe its true that HN has been BlueSky'd and Twitter is the new HN ps. Great post aside from this
• 1p09gj20g8h 3mo ago
  Money
• insane_dreamer 3mo ago
  I think the turning point was not 10 years ago, but 15 years ago with Facebook's IPO. Since then, the only thing that's mattered in tech is "how will you monetize", and monetization doesn't mean a modestly successful software company, no, it's a billion dollar unicorn or bust. Or getting your company to a high valuation and then sell and gtfo, rinse and repeat. So why do you get? The people who care very much about making a billion dollars. And for the most part, people who care very much about that are assholes.
• WhitneyLand 3mo ago
  You can tell you’re slop weary when it feels enjoyable just to read text at length written purely by a human.
• CMay 3mo ago
  Big companies tend to be somewhat older companies. The people who run them tend to be older. Older people have had a longer time to adjust to society, open up, get out of their shell. People who run large companies also end up adapting to social contact, which is not something we tend to define nerds by. That is all amplified by social media and youtube which help scale up interpersonal examples for people to adjust to for good or for bad. Some subset of these big companies will be run by people who appreciate that they're having an impact on society and feel that it's important for them to be more public so people can better appreciate who they are. Jeff Bezos was a bit awkward in the 1990s, Bill Gates was way more awkward back then, oh man, it was physically uncomfortable to watch him in interviews. Mark Zuckerberg was absolutely out of touch and forcing himself into the spotlight of his company was a disaster, he rolled -1000 charisma. They had to get Elon Musk to make dice just for that to be possible. Most of them get better over time. These are not people that generally started hugely confident in public or with lots of people, but when you run these companies you gain both confidence and money which make public appearance less painful. You could argue they might sometimes veer into overconfidence to make up for confidence slipping, which can also be seen as ego. There are plenty of nerds out there. Statistically based on population growth and also increases in autism spectrum diagnoses, there are more than ever.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• jazz9k 3mo ago
  It's the logical conclusion of the acceptance of hacktivist/activist groups in the tech community. Activists/Hacktivists want something their way. If they don't get it, they resort to violence, disruption, and/or harassment (rather than use mainstream political tools like trying to get elected into office or trying to get new laws passed). This sort of behavior is authoritarian. During Covid, this was was very apparent. I saw tech leaders supporting forced vaccinations, suppressing opinions online, and getting people fired from their job for simply stating their opinion. Magazines like 2600, who always championed freedom of speech and expression during multiple administrations, showed their true colors. They supported suppression of people they disagreed with politically. Twitter/Facebook were found to be colluding with the government to target individuals that made the government look bad or had contrarian views. The worst part? It was swept under the rug. Nobody in the tech industry cared. This is why I support the suppression of rights of people I disagree with politically. This tit for tat will need to continue, until lessons are learned, and it stops for everyone.
• lutusp 3mo ago
  This is easy to answer -- the nerds are out there, but they don't push themselves into the spotlight. The reason Sam Altman gets more press than Linus Torvalds is because Altman is a media spectacle and Torvalds is a technologist. In terms of importance, Torvalds outranks Altman. In terms of flash, the reverse. Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.
• romaniv 3mo ago
  The premise of the article is faulty. "Nerds" became "cool" as technology became more important, so sociopaths in leadership positions stated to pretend to be nerds. It's as simple as that. I think a far more important question is why we no longer have more reasonable public figures. Who are the modern equivalents of Isaac Asimov or Richard Feynman?
• ranger207 3mo ago
  nerds built companies largely as a byproduct of their own interests. they made a lot of money because their technologies were great, but it was always about the tech, not the person. then vcs came in and convinced themselves that actually it was about the person, and started deploying money based on the people instead of the technology
• dualvariable 3mo ago
  I think the bigger social problem is that too many people think it is counter-cultural to be defending rich people and billionaires, and an act of rebellion to mindlessly consume.
• SpicyLemonZest 3mo ago
  I don’t understand what we’re talking about here. Plenty of founders still embrace nerd-dom, Jensen Huang constantly runs around signing people’s graphics cards. They’re just no longer part of the story media outlets wish to tell about tech.
• Animats 3mo ago
  What happened is that the computing industry was acquired by the advertising industry. What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. That leads to a sane industry. Now, most of the big names in computing are ad-supported. That's a completely different dynamic. The hype is the product. The user is the enemy. On August 9, 2006, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] Before that, "search engine optimization" was considered a scumbag business, and it was the job of search engine companies to fight it. On that day, Google made it legitimate and turned evil. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ceos-new-paradigm-cloud-computing-and-advertising-go-hand-in-hand/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ceos-new-paradigm-cloud...
• asveikau 3mo ago
  > Phase one (late 1970s to 2007): the founder as charismatic, mysterious byproduct > Phase two (2007 to 2015): the founder as parable. > Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent. This pops out at me for a few reasons. 1. The grift era started long before 2015. 2. The dotcom era (which falls in the absurdly large 1970s-2007 range) was pretty grifty. 3. Come to think of it, maybe the parable we were sold in the 2007 era was ... Wait for it... A grift?
• ternaryoperator 3mo ago
  Everything the author complains about occurred in the dot-com bubble as well. His view that until 2007 founders were lovable nerds is completely off-base. In Silicon Valley, the same dynamics of start-ups chasing money, then getting it and proclaiming their genius, as they were “going to change the world” happened in 2000 as in similar ways today. The popping of the internet bubble brought back a lot of humility.
• QuantumNoodle 3mo ago
  I am in no way supportive of monopolies though taking "the need to compete" out of the equation and having steady flow of money that won't be cut off if "someone beats you to market" was pretty revolutionary. Consider Bell Labs, staffed with real "nerds" that never had to prostitute themselves or to pitch an idea on the merits of making money -- they simply did stuff that was fun, in ther nerdy way. Because of this we have wireless communication, transistors, digital cameras sensors, c, and many others. (There were a lot of negatives due to this AT&T monopoly but we are talking about nerds here and having to socialize your own worth/value. It's a shitty game that real nerds aren't necessary interested in playing)
• geldedus 3mo ago
  nerds and geeks are different beasts
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo ago
  Money happened
• Yapping7880 3mo ago
  I feel like, as an industry or social group, we're going through a midlife crisis. There were so many people in tech who I looked up to as a young engineer, and now it feels especially bleak for young people in tech to find role models. But that could just be me being ~40 and despising what so many of these people became at ~60+. Cleve Moler, the creator of MATLAB, died a few weeks ago. I've had the opportunity to meet him a few times, and despite him being a genuine mathematical genuis, the thing that impressed me so much was how humble he was, how anti-braggadocious. He was like this in person, privately, and also in public. Moler was an early post-WW2 engineer, his cohort is a shrinking class, and I'm worried about those who are taking their place, and then what happens when my generation and the younger replace them.
  • sublinear 3mo ago
    At the other side of the "midlife crisis" is the self-acceptance and maturity to become that role model. I'm not saying that to glorify anything. The sentiments in your comment could have been written at any point in human history. Part of that maturity is to lose the ego too. You're not a hero for doing what feels natural, and that is to share what you have been fortunate enough to gather so far.
• daft_pink 3mo ago
  What happened to nerds? We won. I used to stay up all night watching Nasa launches and landings as a kid. I felt like an outcast. Now everyone’s wearing Nasa shirts like it’s cool and they don’t really have any good launches. We used to be outcasts and now I look at youngsters and they’re doing the same things and it’s cool…? It’s like suddnely the jocks are the outcasts.
• JohnMakin 3mo ago
  At the outset of my career I was lucky (in a way) to have the veil ripped forcefully off of my face as to the ugliness inherent in the VC backed tech world. I was believing I was working on something very important as one of the initial hires in a 10 person standup, with series B funding "on the way any minute now," knew it was a risk but believed strongly in the tech, maybe naively. Found out later, the CEO had been given a generous buyout offer by a competitor, in the 8 figures, a modest amount but far exceeding our level of debt/investment to that point, would have made several of us including him a decent chunk of change. This guy got it in his head at that point that the offer was insulting, and we should be worth billions, not this 'paltry' sum. I could barely believe it when I heard it way after the fact (I would have quit earlier if I had known). What I understand is the board of investors was not very happy with this and there would be no more funding to come in after that point. Within 6 months of that, I went from this bright eyed person to a person not receiving a paycheck for several months, wiping out my early-grad finances in record time, and a significant amount of debt, all the while they shopped our team around the country desperately looking for a buyer. (they did not find one and had to borrow more money to pay our wages). Needless to say after that I resolved never ever ever to work at any kind of 'startup' ever again, and my career many years later has finally recovered (though my cynicism has not).
• supertroop 3mo ago
  Weird twist at the end. Media plays a large role. Some people watch zero news and just listen to talk shows and influencers. Doesn’t surprise me they fall for narratives so easily.
• musicale 3mo ago
  Woz really does seem to be both a brilliant and nice guy. Steve Jobs was brilliant and complicated with many down sides, but he also seemed to have good taste and to care about user experience as well as good design, and his era at Apple produced exceptional products that redefined their categories: Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. Even Jobs' failures were interesting: NeXT, Mac G4 Cube, iPod Hi-Fi. Well, except for the hockey puck mouse which seems like an obviously bad idea.
• rambojohnson 3mo ago
  they're sieg heiling at the podium now.
• ChocMontePy 3mo ago
  I must be the only one here loving those Mafia videos. I'm sad they are stopping after three episodes. Links to the first two episodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCwQe7P8T0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCwQe7P8T0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP80Jrf2xrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP80Jrf2xrk
• AuthAuth 3mo ago
  Im so sick of Steve Jobs and apple glaze. You like it because marketing targeted at you. It was no more slick than other products at the time and worked no better. You liked it because the company threw money at a very successful marketing campaign. These people are not nerds they are extreme outliers and not much different to the CEOs of today.
• Millennium 3mo ago
  Most nerds became collateral damage from society's attempts to contain something much darker: something we mostly forgot even existed, and only fought through outdated traditions. We meant well when we tore out those countermeasures, and we did end that collateral damage. But we no longer remembered what we were keeping at bay, and so we also set the darkness free. The monsters at the top are only part of the problem, and might not even be the biggest: they have plenty of counterparts at the bottom who are in some ways even worse. Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.
• dyl000 3mo ago
  They all got rich, hopped on trt and are huge now