It's a big world--I've only been in a small part of it. I can believe the region of it you're talking about is that way. All I can say is, it's strikingly the opposite in the more boring end of the field. It's funny actually--computer science drew me away from the art world in NY in part because the people in that sphere were so unbearable. The contrast was stark. And interestingly, the gender distribution is, if anything, even more lopsided in the art world than in the tech world. Art degrees go mostly to women, but the artists who get the big bucks and the galleries are overwhelmingly men. The contrast between the art world and the engineering world at the time was vast--in the engineering world, if you have a speck of talent, people literally line up to help you. They call you into their offices to discuss what they could do to move your career along. (At least they did then.) In the art world, the opposite applies. It's a shark tank that filters for mediocrity. Anyway, when the WWW came out two years after I went to work in computing, it was very dismaying to see the same kind of people sweep the industry. Prior to 1991, "glory" was a word that would have occurred to exactly nobody to use in the context of coding!