>I think it's more accurate to say that more socially adept people have infiltrated the tech scene due to the loot. Sure tech no longer equates to nerd like it did back then, and bullying is managed differently now, but let's not pretend that the same type of kids that were into tech back then are ruling the world today.

Ok you do make a good point about people coming into tech for the money. It was quite a recent phenomenon. About 15 years ago I was finishing at my engineering focused university and my CS department was considered loser ville. Only the deeply passionate people wanted to enroll in that program. Everyone else went into Engineering or the sciences. Fast forward a few years later, and they are the largest department in the university. We are at the tail end of a massive bubble and its possible that if AI sticks around or the tech industry cannot support these valuations, its likely that high salary gigs will become scarce. I guess we will then see if this field grew because most people genuinely wanted to be here vs people just looking for dollar signs.

>This is why I chose the words "bookworm" and "studious" because those things do not necessarily mean tech.

Yeah I'd imagine those kids would have gone into Engineering or similar fields instead. They really arent the people I was talking about. I considered the social structure growing up to be the "jocks" at one end of the social spectrum and the "techies" at the other end with a massive amount of regular people in the middle.

If you take these middle people and just filter for B average grades or higher, these middle people wouldn't necessarily consider tech because it just wasn't really a 24 hour lifestyle thing for highschool kids in the 2000s. Yeah we had computers and video games but for most people, computers were that beige box in the den you'd play with once in a while, not a career. I recall in high school (mid 2000s) coding was offered and they couldn't even fill the entire class. The only course computer related that had any relevance was graphic design. The industry really expanded post iPhone when computing became a 24/7 lifestyle. In my opinion thats when the normies started considering computing as a career because it now impacted them directly.