this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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The "tech" label confuses me as a non-american. This means just IT programming/computer stuff, right? Because it's funny to me that stuff like mechanical engineering isn't considered part of "tech".
Might be that the "tech" market is now saturated. Computer science was THE trend topic to doin STEM from my subjective view, so maybe that crashed into the bursting tech bubble that we are experiencing now with all the enshittification and layoffs and stuff.
Also most workers at tech companies are not computer programmers. Marketing, sales, support, success, operations, managment, recruiting, HR, accounting, project managment, and product managment usually make up most of the employees. You are probably better at these jobs if you have prior experience in the same industry, but what job isn't like that?
It's actually very confusing. I think the only good definition is that it's a cultural designation for any company that was focused on digital technology at its inception, which comes with a certain cultural package, and even that has some problems. Netflix is a tech company, not a movie studio, but HBO is not a tech company, even though it also has a streaming platform, and Netflix produces a lot of its own stuff, which is even more confusing because Netflix started as a company that would mail you DVDs. Amazon is a tech company, but WalMart is not, even though Amazon has many physical stores and WalMart does more and more of its business online.
Mechanical engineering can be a part of tech, but again I think it's a cultural designation before anything else at this point. Plenty of mechanical engineers work at Apple, which is definitely a tech company, but if you're a mechanical engineer working on an oil rig, that's not tech.
Add to the confusion that Twitter is a tech company. At this point, what technology is Twitter really developing? Isn't technology about innovation? No doubt that a platform of that size has substantial daily engineering problems to overcome, but like... is that really what we mean when we say technology? Plenty of non-tech companies also deal with the same thing.
I wrote a whole thing fleshing out my theory, if you're curious.
edit: just under this post in my feed is one about how netflix is going to open physical stores.
"Tech" in the tech sector is really just short for high technology, which itself mostly just means information technology.
Engineers work on all kinds of technologies, not just information technology.
There's lots of things that are 'high tech' that aren't IT, though. Microsystems, nanotech, nanophotonics, high-precision machining, etc.