[TrackerFF]

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.

[abstractcontrol]

> 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.

You could clock out, but I don't think the top performers ever stop thinking about work. Everything you've written here has to be wrong.

[TrackerFF]

Depends on the work. I've worked places (military intel) where you leave work at work, simply because it is impossible to take work with you home. Some of the people I worked with said that was exactly why they chose that line of work - so that they never had to think about work when they came home. Some of those were also top performers.

But I also knew other top performers that basically had geopolitics as their hobby, and would study OSINT (open-source intelligence) when they came home.

And obviously there are many other professions where you can do really well, and don't think a second about work when your day is over. Really depends on how your work is structured!

[almost_usual]

Some people are naturally talented at things. It’s no different than an average athlete who works extremely hard and an elite athlete who puts in half the work but still outperforms the average.

[p-e-w]

What? Elite athletes put in unimaginably more work than average athletes.

[bandofthehawk]

I think what he meant was that you can take a group of people and train them for a sport. Some of those people (genetically elite athletes) will improve very quickly with minimal training, others can do massive amounts of training and never reach beyond a certain level.

[abstractcontrol]

Yes, this is what I mean. It's not that talent doesn't exist, but it's never the case that people on the top of their domain work less hard than others. In fact, it's the opposite. People don't have talent, the talent has them.

[SJC_Hacker]

Not necessarily. See George Best

[almost_usual]

Elites who put in a lot of work are world class. You can’t outwork genetics.

[hectdev]

I promise you top performers aren't always thinking about work. There is proof in going detached from work problems and doing other things can help produce novel solutions. Same principle as getting a good night's sleep vs cramming the night before a test. Your subconscious does a lot of lifting. Never being able to put down work is just anxiety masked as dedication, in my book.

[mrhottakes]

> Everything you've written here has to be wrong.

This is certainly incorrect.

[spongebobstoes]

all the best coders and engineers I've worked with have been nerds and very passionate about computers

passion is necessary but not sufficient to be the best. you can be top 20% without passion, but you can't be top 1%

[dasil003]

I agree with you there's a lot of gatekeeping around "passion" for tech. I don't like that framing, but having seen the effect of success and the type of people it has brought into the industry that would never have even considered a few decades ago, I see why people look for supplemental signals, even if the ones they pick are wrong and effectively just shallow tribalism.

However I think this really misses the mark:

> 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.

This is a strawman based around immature, fragile-ego individuals. There are plenty of nerds who realize intelligence, talent, and resourcefulness are completely orthogonal traits from interest in tech. The former is over-represented in online discourse, and the latter is more common in engineering leadership in top companies. You can't really be a top-performer in any large-scale effort without realizing that there are top performers in all domains, and they have insights you don't have. You can't do great things if you don't leave space to learn about your own blind spots, and have a productive dialogue with people who have a completely different mental framework than you.

[supertroop]

There’s also the over inflated sense of self worth. Programmers are a breed apart when it comes to arrogance.