I'll take an eclectic bunch of weirdos who all do and like cool shit over the corpo conformist normies any day. Super easy to suss out who is who when you first meet them. Just ask what they like to do when they aren't laboring under the thumb of capitalism. The cool people will talk your ear off about some esoteric whatever.

The ratio changed after software engineering became a way to make a lot of money. It used to be there were a handful of well paying gigs and a bunch of "pretty good" jobs, but SE wasn't a huge outlier.

Once people flooded the field to make money, things changed. Used to be if I met another software engineer they'd 100% geek out over technology, CPU architectures, programming languages, etc. It wasn't ever just a job.

Or to put it another way, Microsoft used to be filled with people rocking back and forth in their chairs avoiding eye contact discussing cool tech things. When I went on my interview loop at MSFT I discussed the mornings Slashdot headlines with every person who interviewed me.

Okay, what I said was definitely over exaggerating. Let's say, much more weird people here than weird people I met in other environments

SV/NY is pretty concentrated with "non-weird" SWEs these days unless you count "money-oriented" as weird. "CS degree from a top program followed by FAANG or NYC Fintech" was a common default path for reasonably-smart/reasonably-socially-skilled/highly-career-motivated high school students to aim at for a while.