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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Why wouldnt IT be tech? Infrastructure is still technology

Its a bit of a category error. IT IS technically "Tech", but it's not in the context people actually talk about it. People like to ride up on coat tails of adjacent things that give them prestige by believing they are apart of the "great transformational wave" The tech boom has been driven by an explosion of SWE and SWE-specialty jobs not IT jobs. When people call this the "Tech Boom" they expect everyone to understand the imprecise terminology. IT jobs are costs, more of them doesn't drive a surplus of value because more cost is just more cost. As far as I know IT folks don't really develop products unless they are selling them to other IT folks as costs for their IT stuff. Cloud Engineers are probably a border area, idk who claims them. Idk if the modal Cloud Engineer starts as a help-desk IT intern either. The ones I know are SWE -> Cloud.

Your analogy is actually good, but you misunderstand it. If we said there was a Medicine Boom: lots of high paying medical jobs, shortages of skilled laborers, go get the job from college ASAP! And then a bunch of people went out and got Chiropractor, Acupuncturist, CNA jobs and then complained about low pay and large competition. Well those are technically "medical" jobs but the "medical jobs" we were really talking about was doctors, nurses, and PAs. Another would be women in STEM, which is Science Technology, Education, Medicine. Well women actually already dominate Education and Medicine, about 50% of Science, and 50% in things like Biomechanical Engineering, or Environmental Engineering. They have low numbers in hard sciences, and hard engineering disciplines like ECE, CS or Aero. IT is the same for CS, its "Tech" but its not the "Tech" that's being talked about as driving the Tech boom.

Thats an interesting critique. I havent heard of the too much white space critique before. How do i compress everything, while still sounding significant? Run it through GPT-5?

Your resume is literally 2 pages, I didn't even realize it at first. You just get rid of all the extra white space. idk if you need a llm to do that. Think about it this way, If you have a lot to say because you've done so much stuff, then your resume would like bursting, you want it to look like you almost struggled to include all of your stuff in 1 page. Instead it looks like you have lots of white space and two pages which means you wanted to fill the page so you added empty lines (not actually, but could be framed as such).

I mean. Per my resume, I did do most of this. As did many of my peers. We aren't jobless at all. Its just difficult to take the next step after help-desk.

This might just be the difference in our two "Tech" fields. But my career path looked like: Electrical Engineer Intern -> Robotics Intern -> ML Intern -> ML Engineer. My last two internships I was just doing normal Junior ML work with a bit more hand-holding. It wasn't difficult to transition because the transition was just more independence on the same experience. I'm not sure what the transition from Help-Desk IT to Cloud Engineer is, but it feels like Cloud Engineers, or Network Engineers don't start at help-desk or the transition is a lot.

P.S. I could also just be full of shit, I'm not in your field and don't pay much attention to it. Just giving my experience.