The "nerds" make 120-200k a year. The 25 year olds that went to Arizona State and studied drinking, getting laid, and "business" make up to 300k a year doing enterprise sales for startups.
The current culture is, "hey thanks NERD for geeking out on that distributed systems BS, really helped me out on my last sales call/commission."
Then the "NERD" gets to wonder what the F to do with their life come their mid 30s, while said sales person is set.
But yeah, let's keep calling ourselves nerds and allowing this to happen.
We also call ourselves "geeks," which is also quite bad, and we've done little to stop the media and industry rebranding us as "coders," a job title with little prestige or connotations of authority and professionalism, over our previous titles like "software engineer/developer/architect" or even just "programmer." Collectively, we're really pretty socially inept, aren't we?
The current culture is, "hey thanks NERD for geeking out on that distributed systems BS, really helped me out on my last sales call/commission."
Then the "NERD" gets to wonder what the F to do with their life come their mid 30s, while said sales person is set.
But yeah, let's keep calling ourselves nerds and allowing this to happen.