[sanderjd]

I don't think that transformation has really happened in the public imagination at large, but perhaps it has in the bay area. Sure, the public imagination is somewhat taken with some of technology's successful figures, like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, but successful business-people have always been admired, regardless of whether their background is in finance or marketing or management or engineering or programming.

[j2kun]

This is especially considering how every Turing award winner is recognized for extremely technical contributions. There's no way the general public will think of Richard Karp or Stephen Cook as a hero because they won't even be able to say anything resembling what they did.

[smeyer]

Most Nobel prizes in physics are awarded for extremely technical work as well, but people frequently find ways to distill some of it into something understandable enough to make for good popular articles whenever the prizes are announced.