I disagree with this assessment. Unattractive or non-conforming men may be drawn into tech but it does not mean that they are the ones who rise to the top. To be a good engineer you need good social skills. You need to have good negotiation, communication, and public speaking skills to get any sort of buy-in for your ideas, to have a good rapport with your manager, pm, clients, sales staff, or even just to get through a job interview. And most importantly you have to be very tolerant to quirky behavior and especially towards people with disabilities. A mind is a precious thing to waste, so if you can't work with someone like a Stephen Hawkins then you don't belong in a STEM field, period.

What I've found after working in the industry for a while is that those with poor social skills get left behind in some of the worst places to work I can possibly imagine, whereas those who graduate to the best jobs and highest salaries are the kind of people you'd definitely want to go have a beer with. And looking at it from the other end - the venture capitalists and corporate officers are anything but "neckbeards" in part because there's an incredibly strong demand for good social skills in their ranks.

It's almost like there are two separate tech industries. There are what I call the "true" software companies that recruit the best talent and offer them great salaries and almost mythical working conditions, and then there are the "enterprise" software companies that shove engineers to the bottom of the barrel, where they take their orders from lowly intermediaries that shield them from any sort of legitimate decision making power. They're practically abused, one step removed from getting outsourced to some low-wage labor market in a developing country. I would say that this is the real danger of not having enough social skills in tech - you'll get stuck at one of these god-awful jobs like Milton in Office Space.

The problem is that contrary to popular mythology, women don't possess good social skills just because they were born with a pussy. They're not guaranteed to advance in the tech industry any more than a socially awkward man. We've all heard of those batshit-crazy women of Silicon Valley who, with their intemperate behavior, cause a lot of trouble for their employers, destroys morale, and make everyone involved look bad. In another time, they would have been candidates for the cucking stool.