[ylee]

>Google is full of Ivy Leaguers like that, who would have just gone to Wall Street 8 years ago

I am one of those Ivy Leaguers, except a) I did go to Wall Street, and b) I liked my job.

More to the point, computers have been a hobby all my life. I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.

Yet I have never desired to work as a professional software developer. My verbal and math scores on the SAT are almost identical. I majored in history and Spanish in college while working for the university's Unix systems group. Before graduation I interviewed and got offers (including one explicitly as a developer) at various tech startups. Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies; my manager was looking for a CS major but I was able to convince her that I had the equivalent thereof. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732772>

Meanwhile, I continue to putter around with Elisp (and marveling at Lisp's elegance) and bash (and wincing at its idiosyncracies) at home, and also experiment with running local LLMs on my MacBook. My current project is fixing bugs and adding features to VM, the written-in-Elisp email client I have used for three decades. So I say, bring on AI! Hopefully it will mean fewer people going into tech just to make lots of money and more who, like me and Wall Street, really want to do it for its own sake.