There's a game, played by certain rules. One way to win the game is to adopt a persona or alter ego, which acts as a form of sandbox/VM.

Those who play the game well get money. The money attracts players from all over the world. More money attracts more competitive players. A $300k salary and some artificial rules like interview mastery attracts more gamey types.

There are places that don't play by those rules. There will still be some gamification - for example, the other rules may reward those who share knowledge, are polite, honest, down to earth, and so on. They may still be performative, but it looks less like one.

There's a reason hackers go around in t-shirts and uncombed hair, and it's performative in itself.

Ok I will give you a simple method to separate the 2 groups of nerds and hustlers. Now this is not fool proof, but is good for about 80% of the time.

If they approach you - Hustler.

If you HAVE to start the conversation - Nerd - you might have to restart it too.

Most nerds are so involved in tech that they do not spend time working on social skills.

Most hustlers skip the tech and refine their social skills.

So find some techie forums / meetup / events and start interacting.

Myself I can fake social for about 15 to 30 minutes, but then I am exhausted. And I could not hustle my way out of a paper bag.

> What happened to building cool stuff, not having an ego and being real.

There are certainly developers building stuff just for the passion of solving problems and producing high quality products. You have to know where to find these people, because they aren’t common and typically are not self promoting.

The people more interested in marketing and promoting themselves tend to devote more time and attention to that noise than the energy required to solving challenging problems.

It seems to me that there are many people in almost every field who are more interested in what you can do for them, than in working with you collaboratively to build something meaningful.

I don't know that there are more or less of them in tech, than in other fields.

It’s because Tech is too broad a word, encompassing curious engineers with pure motives all the way to hucksters shilling their offerings for ad revenue.

Try hanging out with people who have paying jobs doing the thing. (Not trying to break in, not founding a startup, not selling an idea). I worked at a FAANG company. People were honestly smart, capable, humble. (There was a strong correlation between the most effective tech people and their humility)

Maybe I got lucky. In retrospect I probably got super lucky.

pick your clique: nerds & hustlers

the two tribes of tech

because theres so much money in it...try the arts, social services, religion, primary and secondary sectors, and people are way nicer

do you have any hacker spaces nearby. You should meet the good people there

Welcome to the human species!

You may be hanging with the wrong crowds in the sense that your people are out there somewhere and you just haven't found them yet, but your people are still a minority. One would hope that tech would have more genuine and curious people, but I swear most of us are hustlers who bought a shovel for a particular gold rush.

In my experience, you'll have the best luck finding likeminded people at hacker spaces and conferences.

balooned ego = insecurity blackhole

what kinds of things have you built?

Are you talking to founders or engineers?

If it’s the founder I totally get it. Time is money and money is time.

If it’s engineers then they need to realize they’re just expense line items. And they need to chill the fuck out.

Lol.

Capitalism breeds and rewards sociopathic behavior: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... and tech is the most ruthlessly capitalistic, and thus sociopathic, sector. Note that almost every recent innovation made by tech (crypto, NFTs and AI) is defined by naked grift and hype.

The second the internet became a place to make "real money" its fate was sealed.