What the Fuck Happened to Nerds

I've befriended some of the most thoughtful, brilliant, curious, eccentric, and sincere people I've ever met in the tech industry. Many of my dearest friends are former coworkers. I've also encountered the most egocentric, delusional, irritating personalities imaginable in tech. It is a mixed bag, like anything. But increasingly, the egomaniacs are not only taking center stage at the most influential tier of their respective companies - whether as 'founding engineers' or founders/CEOs/CTOs/ETCs or 'GTM engineers' - but they're also talking about themselves incessantly online. That is not good for any of us. This blog is long so here is the short version: 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. Over the last decade and change, its leadership discovered that this trust could be liquidated and converted into a different asset, attention, at what looked like a…