Ok I will give you a simple method to separate the 2 groups of nerds and hustlers. Now this is not fool proof, but is good for about 80% of the time.

If they approach you - Hustler.

If you HAVE to start the conversation - Nerd - you might have to restart it too.

Most nerds are so involved in tech that they do not spend time working on social skills.

Most hustlers skip the tech and refine their social skills.

So find some techie forums / meetup / events and start interacting.

Myself I can fake social for about 15 to 30 minutes, but then I am exhausted. And I could not hustle my way out of a paper bag.

Welcome to the human species!

You may be hanging with the wrong crowds in the sense that your people are out there somewhere and you just haven't found them yet, but your people are still a minority. One would hope that tech would have more genuine and curious people, but I swear most of us are hustlers who bought a shovel for a particular gold rush.

In my experience, you'll have the best luck finding likeminded people at hacker spaces and conferences.

> What happened to building cool stuff, not having an ego and being real.

There are certainly developers building stuff just for the passion of solving problems and producing high quality products. You have to know where to find these people, because they aren’t common and typically are not self promoting.

The people more interested in marketing and promoting themselves tend to devote more time and attention to that noise than the energy required to solving challenging problems.

It’s because Tech is too broad a word, encompassing curious engineers with pure motives all the way to hucksters shilling their offerings for ad revenue.

do you have any hacker spaces nearby. You should meet the good people there

pick your clique: nerds & hustlers

the two tribes of tech

what kinds of things have you built?

Try hanging out with people who have paying jobs doing the thing. (Not trying to break in, not founding a startup, not selling an idea). I worked at a FAANG company. People were honestly smart, capable, humble. (There was a strong correlation between the most effective tech people and their humility)

Maybe I got lucky. In retrospect I probably got super lucky.

because theres so much money in it...try the arts, social services, religion, primary and secondary sectors, and people are way nicer

Lol.