Born 1858, died 1947, pretty much everything known about anything changed somewhat in that time period, and he was literally part of a lot of it, and helped convince people and change their minds without them dying.
Almost like the quote is utter bullshit.
As that is the country we are talking about here.
For the $500 entry fee you would think they could provide earphones and someone would hack together an app that would let you listen through those earphones based on some sort of proximity detection. No doubt the first year someone would find a vulnerability in it and would need parallel deployment to the existing infrastructure, but still.
You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We love strong hierarchies!"? Don't be daft.
No it hasn't. It started as counterculture. 90's hacker ethos might as well make you a fascist these days.
I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”