This is a serious question. I know the answers may be biased by general antiwork attitude, but I don´t know where to ask it otherwise; in tech subs, it got deleted.
The reason I ask is that I do not understand what people, and so many at that, are doing in that industry. Ok, not everyone – tech is a lot of things. Some are truly capable engineers who develop helpful medical technology, or programmers who create software with great usability. But those are actually pretty advanced, nerdy jobs for people whom I would assume have invested a lot of time truly understanding very complicated things. I am thinking several years of advanced maths, thousands of hours for their master thesis, real sacrifice, that kind of stuff. There is, in my perception, a natural cap on how many of these superbrains a society can produce.
And then there is this pretty big segment of cool tech people who all look like streamlined urban hipsters, and I don´t really perceive them as being super above average intelligent, they actually don´t come across as being adult-serious about anything at all, so I don´t know if they are true deep diggers? The industry does portray them as such, super duper top tier talent second to none, and it may be true – I am explicitly not excluding the option that I am the one who´s not up to date. I have however grown a bit wary of jobs or purposes that make no immediate sense to me. And as of lately, we heard how many people they could lay off at Twitter and the thing still up and running regardless.
So, can someone please break this down? It is really a smart and meaningful industry across the board?