True to some extent. I'm a mechanical engineer and every engineering I know would answer 'yes' when asked if they were technical. I'd be shocked if anyone out there defined 'non-technical' in such a broad way that an engineer wouldn't count just because they were laying out a circuit board or designing a biomedical device instead of writing Ruby on Rails code..

What I think: technical = can build stuff i.e. software <=> coder, hardware <=> electrical engineer, physical product <=> mechanical engineer and so on...

Bah... Hackernews is mainly about web apps and mobile apps. Sadly.

If the mechanical engineers were doing a startup that involved mechanical engineering then I would say they are technical.

Technical = Coder goes hand in hand with the narrow definition of 'startup' that's commonly used here. It's not meant to discount other engineering abilities, it's just a bit of jargon one needs to adapt to.

I looked at the word technical and instantly knew that it was suggesting the question if I write code. I am not a coder, I am familiar with it, but I am closer to the guy trying to build a company by getting a group of coders together. The point is that nobody should be offended, in fact it is even ok to believe your technical if other techs believe you are not. Any startup needs all the cogs in the wheel to run, from the simpletons to the most advanced, and we all should embrace the role we find ourselves in and change it if we believe we were meant for something else.

It's this very narrow definition that is my problem. Your Average Silicon Valley Co-founder can't even imagine that a company could not be about web or mobile apps. I find this apalling.

It makes me wonder whether Peter Thiel is right when he says that the Valley should think more about flying cars and not about 140 characters. I wonder whether the people in the Valley lost the ability to think about anything other than 140 characters.

It sure is a competitive advantage of other high-tech regions in the world: less (or different) tunnel vision.

Some of the best programmers I know have mechanical engineering backgrounds!

Thats because there is a hell of a lot of coding in mech eng degree now. I actually did a few programming courses in my comp sci degree as an elective that were titled mech302 mech326 and didnt have the equivalent in the comp-sci department (which was disturbing actually).

I think reason being is that before, mechanical engineering was just purely, mechanical engineering, where as now the mechanical engineering degree (in my old uni anyway) was combined with mechatronic, which was robotics, and alot of low level process control type courses that for obvious reasons required alot of programming ... They basically fell under the same department

Some of my best friends are gay!