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Do you think a normie would be impressed if they asked “who are you and why should I care” and the person answered they got 2k GitHub stars on their Rust tokenisation library? I personally don’t see how becoming the master of an incredibly niche and nerdy domain that no one cares about would be motivated by the desire not to be worthless. It would explain high-status jobs like doctor, lawyer, stock broker, etc.
I think it’s more explainable by the rates of autism in trans women. Autistic people tend to be deeply obsessive from a young age and aren’t motivated by social reasons or even a sense of cosmic worthlessness - some autistic fixations are absurdly pointless. Also, programming has an immediate, intrinsically rewarding feedback loop that can be pursued entirely solitarily, and the people in it famously don’t care about fitting into social norms (if you’re a good programmer, you’ll get a job even if you’re an awkward nerd, a furry, or a trans woman).
I’m an autistic transwoman and I spent most of my childhood in obsessive fantasy worlds - programming appealed to me because it was inherently “depersonalising” - I could get lost in code and forget about who I was, and it didn’t matter to other people as well. If anything, I’m motivated by the opposite of status-seeking.
Before that I was an artist and a writer and similarly enjoyed the deep work aspect, but in today’s shamelessly self promoting world you can’t really have art speak for itself anymore, it’s all about the story and the creator behind it. And I got far more appreciation from other people by doing artistic works, than by working alone on weird technical projects that I don’t even share with anybody.
To some extent, yes, if the answer is framed as "open source developer"; however, whether a real person would appreciate it is not even the right question, as I think that in reality any questioning is directed inward (perhaps I should have worded it as "who am I? Why should anyone care?").
I don't buy the autism story, unless you use the Tumblr definition of autism (obsessive interest plus divergence from mainstream sensitivities?) which would make the statement almost tautological. The m:f ratio of clinically relevant autism is cited as something like 3~4:1, but the m:f ratio of "tech personalities with loud public presence" is far in excess of that (even the m:f ratio of "female-identifying (....)", which this thread is about, seems to be). Among the mtf tech people I know (and I know quite about 3 in person, two of them well), none strike me as obviously autistic, and the two I said I know well actually were what I would describe as alpha nerds with above-average smoothness and social intelligence, though there's obviously a more complex selection effect there.
Autism is more prevalent among trans people, by a factor of about 4:1 on top of that.
"Obviously autistic" doesn't necessarily mean much, since autistic people without cognitive disabilities tend to have learned ways to compensate for or hide the things that would normally make their autism obvious ("masking") by the time they reach adulthood.
Did you know either of those people before they transitioned? Because one of the things I noticed, as an autistic trans woman myself, was that estrogen makes it a lot easier to understand and care about what other people are thinking. So I wonder if maybe they were just so competent at masking already that adding hormones pushed them into "above-average social intelligence" territory.
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