Bear with me while I go in reverse order. These types could not become quants. That is a different person who has the visions of money but is also a nerd capable of the technical work. I'm talking about the VC people who hire programmers, engineers, or quants.

These people think they have Big Ideas and to them it isn't really different whether they hire creatives to make art, manufacturing nerds to make semiconductors, software nerds to make SaaS, or biochemists to make pharmaceuticals. It's all inscrutable mundane details to them and their magical thinking. After a career observing such things, I've come to see abstraction as something that can cross from virtue into malignancy.

I think the AI dream is driving some of this type towards madness. As someone in another sub-thread observed, It resonates strongly with the way they engage with the world, with delegation of things you don't really understand. But it also promises a kind of pure capitalist scaling where their revenue dreams can be untethered from labor constraints. The current scramble is the attempt to pivot every business dream into one that uses this new set piece.