The OP is mostly talking about image, not reality. What image do tech founders choose to project.

OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dichotomy.

Google was the company that really exploded that paradigm, from their rise to prominence circa 2002 or so, to their IPO and post-IPO halo, around 2005-2007.

Now the nerds didn’t need the suits. They would run their own company.

They were shockingly wealthy and powerful but it was made to seem as a kind of distraction from their true nature. They marketed their own virtue and renunciation, both to the public, and to their own staff. Their business model rejected the previous search engine paradigm (backroom deals and paying for placement) in favor of a new one (complex math to produce the best results). They told the public and their staff the famous “don’t be evil”, and also “focus on the user and all else follows”. There was even a pronouncement that Google would never do such tawdriness as horoscopes.

The theme was that nerdiness was a kind of incorruptibility because a nerd was honest, unconcerned with social status, and unworldly. Let them into your life and they’ll make it all better. Larry Page and Sergey Brin cultivated that image, holding internal and external events where they made themselves look ever nerdier than they actually are, even wearing lab coats.

Now, this didn’t last and was never true. Soon after the IPO, Larry and Sergey bought themselves not just a corporate jet, but a commercial airliner. They justified it as something that was “good for the world” because they could use it to get entire teams of NGO workers on missions of mercy. It actually became a party plane, as far as I know.

People have made "nerdiness" a premium because other nerds view it as passion. The rationale is that if you craft something out of passion, it will somehow be better than. I think it also comes down to the fact that many tech nerds view engineering more as a art than cold engineering, and they view themselves as artists and artisans.

There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're willing to pull more hours, and do whatever it takes to reach your goals.

I also believe that nerds, whatever thing they are obsessed with, make their nerdiness a personality defending trait. Their nerdiness is their personality. And if others aren't as willing to commit, they're simply frauds or wannabes.

Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.

In tech, however, it is too often assumed that you must be consumed by tech. Otherwise you're not really that passionate about it.

Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.

Bill Gates was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.

It’s related to the trope that non-rich people are more ethical than rich people, or nerds would treat women better than jocks. Confusing lack of opportunity to engage in certain behavior for lack of propensity.

> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.

Whatever tenuous link there was between the two, only existed as long as computers were not really seen as a path to wealth and power. Because then a smart person with the capability to enter fields traditionally associated with wealth and power choosing computers reflected putting personal curiosity and interest over pursuing wealth and power as the sole objective.

Virtuous people become doctors, social workers or kindergarten teachers.

People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.

> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.

Because doing something you're genuinely interested is virtuous relative to doing something for personal/reputational gain or due to other social pressures.

> some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through

This could not be more deluded - the negative equivalent of the hustle culture myth: anyone can become a selfish asshole if they work hard enough. The idea that every person who's ever taken an academic interest in tech is just another William Gates III waiting to happen is a very weird way of looking at nerd culture.

They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.

Shouldn't you? Bakers and chefs aren't just "interested in nerdy stuff like chemical reactions," they make food for people. Writers have ethical obligations, both individually and as a group?

I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.

The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something

I think nerd -> believes in science. Science -> requires honesty, curiousity, humility, persistence (i.e. admit you are wrong, accept you losses).

Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).

Contrast matters. Being awake to bigotry and pseudoscience also predates the tech industry, TBF, but eugenics, "scientific" racism, etc. used to be a lot more common. Don't look down on people for expecting better now, even from people who apparently have unresolved issues about what happened in South Africa.

"I identify as a nerd and think I'm virtuous, therefore other people who identify as nerds should be virtuous in order to validate me"

Bill Gates is a great counterexample to the article's premise. Always clearly a nerd, yet led a company that no one loved and many people hated for its strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish.

Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.

I don't think being nerdy makes someone virtuous, that's true. However, I think SV of 20-40 years ago had a distinct culture (best symbolized by Woz) that's basically been lost to the MBA-types and the hustle culture bros. Sometimes they wear it around like a creepy skin suit but it comes across as deeply inauthentic.