What does “technical” even mean? - Pip's Substack
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What does “technical” even mean?<br>Today there are more opportunities than ever for young people. IF you can build stuff.
Pip<br>Jun 30, 2026
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Show off a few cool projects, link your GitHub, upload a chat with Claude Code, and you can get invited to communities, clubs, events, Y Combinator’s Startup School, and more. The whole system runs on the assumption that talent is the kind of thing you can link to.<br>At Harvard, I’ve seen how that’s not true. I have friends who can walk into a room of strangers and leave with ten people who’d go to war for them. A girl who reads three books a week and remembers all of them. When our freshman hall was a pack of wandering eighteen-year-olds with no plan, a few people were the reason we ended up somewhere worth being on a Friday night. Everyone who meets this kind of person is certain they’re going to do something big. But they have nothing to upload.<br>This is a new problem. It’s not that these skills matter less than the coder’s. It’s that they’re harder to prove. A GitHub repo is legible—commits, stars, a little green graph of effort you can scroll through. Charisma, taste, judgment, and the knack for making people care cannot be sent in screenshots. There’s no leaderboard for the person everyone wants in the room. So we’ve quietly decided it doesn’t count.<br>Given my school’s brand, people ask me about my classmates all the time. Who’s going to be successful, who’s worth watching, who’s just amazing to be around. I know how to answer. Everyone can name the people you meet and feel sure about. Sometimes it’s the one who’s made nearly everyone on campus laugh. Sometimes it’s the one who rallies the crowd at every party. Sometimes it’s the planner who figures out what a group of lost freshmen should actually do with their night.<br>Of course, there are the builders too. I could point you to the math genius who can answer anything, or the physics whiz who built a model rocket that looked like a real rocket… in week one. I’m working at SpaceX this summer; I know how to spot these people, and I love being around them. But I wouldn’t necessarily bet on them to contribute more to the world than the ralliers and the comedians and the planners. So, I think reward structures need to change. We are walking into a decade where the building gets automated and the human part doesn’t.<br>If AI is going to write more and more of the code, then the scarce, valuable thing becomes everything AI can’t do—knowing what’s worth building in the first place, persuading people to care, reading a room, and holding one. The market already sees this coming. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs report found that the importance employers place on leadership and social influence has climbed faster than almost any other skill—a roughly 22-percentage-point jump in just two years, the single biggest mover in the report. The world is repricing exactly the talents we’ve decided we can’t measure, yet campus culture hasn’t caught up.<br>Which brings me to the word itself. We sort people into “technical” and “non-technical,” and define half of everyone by the thing they’re not. We picked one kind of rigor and called it the only kind.<br>I assumed the non-technical kids would be lost, but I had it backwards. There is a next step waiting for them, and it’s the only one we’ve bothered to make prestigious.<br>Last year, about 21 percent of our graduating class went straight into finance, and more than half went into finance, consulting, or tech combined. But ask those same seniors where they actually want to be in ten years, and only 8 percent say finance—fewer than 1 percent say consulting. These jobs have just become the default. Its an offer for something legible, lucrative, easy to explain at Thanksgiving, and almost nobody’s actual dream.<br>Meanwhile the builders get a different kind of invitation. A16Z raised over $15 billion in a single fundraise this January and now manages more than $90 billion. They’re a firehose of capital pointed at anyone who can ship a product. The connector, the writer, the person who reads the room better than anyone you know? Their “opportunity” is a recruiting funnel into banking and a signing bonus.<br>I’ll hand it to Harvard, the admissions office does a beautiful job assembling a class with a wild range of interests. Something happens after they arrive. Something is pulling us in one direction and leaving everyone else to drift toward the only well-lit exit. We’ll be fine, but I worry that everything they might have built, led, written, or started if the culture had pointed them somewhere truer instead of somewhere safe.<br>So no, I don’t think everyone needs to learn to vibe-code. More builders isn’t automatically better, least of all in college, where a diversity of obsessions is the entire point. We need a way to make that other kind of to make their talent legible, to celebrate it, to fund it, to...