Smart students with everything going for them get to make this decision:
(A) Dedicate their entire life at college to doing useless problem sets. No free time. No social life. No girlfriends. Spend all your time with stinky nerds drilling on useless sets. Then get out of school and make $80k doing the engineering slog. Max out your salary at $140k, 20 years down the road.
(B) Take easy classes while being a professional partier. At parties, have loads of sex and take lots of drugs while meeting many many people. Build up 1000+ Facebook friends and forge lifelong bonds with important well-connected people. Get your degree and use your connections to get hired for $80k. Have your employer then pay for your MBA. Max out your salary at $400k 20 years down the road, not including bonuses and side deal opportunities.
Phillip Greenspun was right. Unless you're a masochist or a social reject, engineering is for foreign students. A top American student from a good family has no incentive to do engineering: not lifestyle, not financial.
When it comes to software this is even more true because you don't even need an engineering degree to write software. Paul Graham has a philosophy degree and most of his wealth came from people skills: convincing Blackwell and Morris to hack for him, and later convincing young engineers to hack for him.
Steve Jobs vs Steve Wozniak is another perfect example. Woz did the work, Jobs got the glory. Woz stayed home nights hacking while Jobs was out fucking the prom queen and taking credit. Our society does not reward engineers so anyone with the ability and foresight to be a doctor, dentist, MBA, or clinical psychologist is not going to torture themselves.
Hacker News entrepreneurs are just a bunch of masochists who never learned that partying, taking drugs and having sex is more fun and pays better than writing Ruby apps.