one way to characterise a scene is by what it cares about: its markers of prestige, things you ‘ought to do’, its targets to optimise for. for the traders or the engineers, it’s all about that coveted FAANG / jane street internship; for the entrepreneurs, that successful startup (or accelerator), for the researchers, the top-tier-conference first-author paper… the list goes on.
for a given scene, you can think of these as mapping out a plane of legibility in the space of things you could do with your life. so long as your actions and goals stay within the plane, you’re legible to the people in your scene: you gain status and earn the respect of your peers. but step outside of the plane and you become illegible: the people around you no longer understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. they might think you’re wasting your time. if they have a strong interest in you ‘doing well’, they might even get upset.
but while all scenes have a plane of legibility, just like their geometric counterparts these planes rarely intersect: what’s legible and prestigious to one scene might seem utterly ridiculous to another. (take, for instance, dropping out of university to start a startup.)
escaping flatland: career advice for CS undergrads