HN is centered around venture capital, which in college terms is the subtopic of branch Finance under Business Administration. SJSU, a top business school half an hour south of YC Palo Alto, has an intensely competitive Investment program that admits very few applicants for which students directly manage an investment fund; meanwhile, their Accounting under B.A. program is admitting anyone with a GPA of 2.2 or higher. That duality can be deeply confusing to people on the glamorous side of the fence: why would SJSU cheapen itself by admitting literally everyone it possibly can into Accounting by, when being highly selective results in such a high quality Investment program? That confusion fades rapidly when considered from the other direction: Investment is where the glory is, for those who seek that, and for the rest of us, there’s Accounting and Finance.

While HN, VCs, SJSU, and Tech are obviously not composed of the same population or applying the same restrictions, it’s certainly reasonable to highlight one similarity: the potential glory of one’s role at work directly impacts how competitive it is. That we’re currently in a nightmarish layoff cycle due to the ZIRP bubble popping and due to businesses replacing costly (and glorious) creative roles with more economical PREs (prompt reliability engineers) is amplifying this effect more strongly in Tech than in other industries, because Tech — just like the Investing industry that’s underpinned it for so long — has been saturated with glory and competitiveness.

I spent my career in tech working in the roles that do not offer glory — IT, rather than Product; Cost Centers, rather than Profit Centers — but even within IT, there were a couple of roles that had more glory and were much more competitive in their selection and evaluation criteria than others. At my final IT job, we were less strict about credentials and competitiveness with directors and vice presidents than we were about the high-glory role of enterprise architect. So while I do empathize with HN’s bias, having myself once pursued glory in tech, such competitiveness is abnormal in most jobs in most fields.