Scott Aaronson answers a feminist on how he feelt growing up as a "nerd"

The titans of the technology industry are the same type of sharks that became the titans of the tobacco, railroad, steel, car, oil etc. industries of the past.

They have nothing in common with the average worker in a steel mill/oil well/... - or the average nerd in today's IT mills.

Just consider who these successful "nerds" essentially defrauded early in their business and the kind of social skills that are necessary to do that successfully (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates pushing out their respective co-founders as soon as success emerged, Mark Pincus of Zynga taking stock options away from early employees, the Zuckerberg/Winklevoss drama, ...).

Google might be an exception, but Eric Schmidt is certainly not the prototypical nerd, and Page/Brin (assuming they're nerds) might just have been lucky that they managed to hand over control of the company to a shark in the formative years of the company without being ripped off in the process. It might have helped that Schmidt already had roles in a few companies under his belt, and felt generous with those kids - no idea...

Woz is probably in a similar situation of a damn lucky nerd. After all he survived working with Jobs as a co-founder and even tried to fix some of his shenanigans, see http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-gave-early-apple-employees-10-million-in-stock-2014-9.

I'm not saying that nerds are nice by definition (they definitely aren't), but I'm not sure they have what is necessary to implement such schemes without ending up at the wrong end of a pitchfork.

The technology industry still pays well (even for nerds, but MBA types and lawyers certainly make more in IT), but with the wage collusion, worker visas etc some in the industry are certainly trying to solve what I assume they see as a temporary inconvenience - so that the intended order is established again and the industry exclusively benefits those at the top again, not the rank-and-file nerd.

tl;dr: in the tech industry even nerds can do well for now, extremly well given a lot of luck - but I wouldn't consider tech titans nerds or vice-versa.

/r/TrueReddit Thread Link - scottaaronson.com