Question
Have status games in tech changed in the last 10 years?
In ~2014, the high-status thing was technical depth — having shipped a thing that scaled, written a notable open-source project, having "earned your stripes" on a hard problem. Money signaled it but didn't replace it.
Today, my impression is the high-status thing is more about *positioning* — being adjacent to a high-status company at the right time, being a known figure on Twitter, having raised at a notable valuation. The work itself is less of the signal.
I might be wrong. I'm 40 and might be doing the standard "things were better before" thing. But the people I know in tech who do real technical work increasingly describe themselves as out of step with the culture, while 10 years ago they'd have been at its center.
Curious what people 5-10 years younger think.
2 comments
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I'm 34, in infra. You're not wrong but you're also being a little romantic. 2014 tech also had a status game ("worked at Google", "shipped a YC product"). The flavor changed; the existence of status games is constant.
Fair. I think the real shift is the *speed* — in 2014 status was earned over years of work, now it's earned over months of positioning. Different selection pressure.