The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

Mental illness is somewhat linked to creative productivity, sadly. Bipolar disorder is somewhat overrepresented in highly-accomplished musicians, artists, and writers (with the trend going as far back as the 1800s).

It would not surprise me if ASD is overrepresented in scientists and engineers.

However, people also imitate their tribe, and seeing "weird nerds" with mental illness may get other nerds to emulate that behavior without actually being mentally ill.

I have a lot of experience working with the weird nerd archetype and watching them navigate large orgs.

First it's absolutely true that orgs that purport to support weird nerds will revert back to rewarding politicians. I've seen it happen, and typically has to do with who is doling out money.

However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science related) situation.

My advice to weird nerds (assuming emotional intelligence isn't an innate skill) is: Find a way to turn your brainpower onto this challenge as equally important as your core interest. Treat interacting with your institution like a long term engineering project or investigation. Think long term and be strategic, create and track longer term plans, try to learn what people respond to, what works and what doesn't. Always try to be kind and maintain some humility, but assuming you aren't sure what that really means, then ask for lots of feedback. Or you can just find someone you trust and delegate all of this to them, like a technical founder hiring a CEO.

(Edit: relatedly, if you work for or with weird nerds in a support role, my advice is to take full advantage! They might have a useful point, so set your own ego aside, don't take it personally (they are weird), and try to listen charitably. Their work is what you're here to support, after all.)

> and realized that everyone at a certain level or above in administration Came From Money

There's a lot of that. And in academia in general.

Many/most are decent people. But even those often haven't been exposed to the ordinary life experience of the majority people from their country. And that often seems to affect how they think about themselves and the world.

Also, there's often implicit self-promotion and self-interest behavior. Which they might think is normal, since it's in their upbringing, and in the circles they now travel in. But it's not necessarily normal to the masses of their countries (which I'd expect to tend towards more cooperative and egalitarian in some ways).

It feels like more and more areas of life are regressing to the mean in terms of how status is distributed. The mean being some sort of centralized cabal-like structure (perhaps autonomously/accidentally centralized, like an algo) doling out status. By design, it is highly uneven, quasi-random (there are things that make you eligible but there are no guarantees), and their authority to do so unquestioned.

Take social media: it is more about who they've said you are rather than _what_ you say. The key message of the medium is less the content of the message itself (though it figures in!) and more the combination of your online persona's followers + likes along with the message itself. I'd argue social media is a real shift in the Internet itself where we began to take online reputation very, very seriously, to the point that we decided we'd believe that likes were more than just Internet Points.

And people _love_ this sort of structure because it means that something other than actual competence can be the deciding factor. They have a shot at being in the cabal and among the deciders. And it's a lot easier to evaluate people: simply see what other people say about them.

Not saying that non-technical factors don't matter. They matter a lot and are often very easy wins to pick up. But it's clear people like systems that aren't centered around competence as much as they may claim otherwise. And areas where that isn't the case seem to eventually be converted to more conventional hierarchies.

> In some ways, things are better than ever for folks like you. Starting and running a one-person business making software is feasible now but would've been much harder in decades past.

Yes, you are absolutely right.

Unfortunately, I have been trying that and failing. I don't blame anyone for that either.

> Unfortunately, industry has problems that are big enough that they're not easily solved with one person. So tools that work to bring about a team's success will be valuable. As will individuals who work well in teams.

You are absolutely correct. And yes, that is why people shouldn't hire me.

Nevertheless, I think there are some problems that one person can solve.

I want to make the next-gen version control system. I think that may be small enough for one person. Other infrastructure software can be like that too.