Rise and Fall of Tech Bros in Silicon Valley

Tech Bros transitioned from celebrated innovators to unpopular figures, facing layoffs and scrutiny as their industry evolved.

### The Rise and Fall of Tech Bros: From Golden Age to Gloomy Realities
* 👔 Before the year 2000, traditional high-income careers in finance, medicine, law, and management required a **formal appearance**, but the tech boom introduced a new wave of millionaires who **defied these norms**.
* 💻 The emergence of **Tech Bros**, who enjoyed **better perks and work-life balance** while creating innovative products, contrasted sharply with the negative perceptions surrounding executives and bankers during economic downturns.
* 📉 However, over the past 15 years, many Tech Bros have faced layoffs and a shift in their industry, as companies like Facebook and Google begin to **prioritize automation and artificial intelligence**, threatening their **job security**.
* 📊 The tech industry experienced a boom and bust cycle, with the NASDAQ **peaking in 2000 and then collapsing**, leading to a cleansing of the market that allowed only the **most valuable companies to thrive**.
* 💰 The mid-2010s saw a rush for talent, with companies hiring aggressively to **capture market share**, but this strategy led to **overhiring and ultimately mass layoffs** when market conditions changed.
* 🏙 The concentration of tech companies in expensive cities has made living conditions challenging for workers, forcing many to **share accommodations despite high salaries**, further exacerbating local resentment towards the tech industry.
* 🔄 Remote work could have alleviated some of these issues, but companies are now pushing for a **return to the office**, leaving workers feeling **trapped and undervalued** in a rapidly evolving landscape.
* 📰 As public perception shifts against the tech industry, the once-cherished image of **Tech Bros has soured**, leading to a **growing unpopularity** that mirrors the sentiments once directed at **Finance Bros**.

before the year 2000, if you wanted to make a lot of money in a predictable career, you needed a nice suit and an important-looking business card. Your options were Finance, medicine, law, or senior company management if you were lucky. But then, just a few years later, at around the same time as those people in fancy suits were blowing up the global economy, a new breed of millionaire was entering the mainstream. They replaced their puffer vests in Bloomberg terminals with flip-flops and Vim terminals. Tech Bros worked fewer hours, had better perks, and in many cases made better money than their peers in more traditional high-income roles. What's more is that people didn't hate them. Executives, bankers, and their fancy lawyers were blamed for enriching themselves by leeching off a broken system that cost people their homes, their jobs, and their futures. Meanwhile, people loved the idea of hacky sack-playing nerds making millions by actually making stuff that improved our lives.

but now, 15 years later, the tech Bros became everything they promised to destroy, and they kind of destroyed themselves in the process. New reporting indicates that Facebook is planning a new system to track users' data even as they leave the site with a revolutionary new product. What was your vision? Well, computer on lay off up to 10,000 workers. There's Larry, CEO of Google, say something on hi at their Peak Tech Bros enjoyed endless career progression opportunities, options packages that can make the multi-millionaires before they were 30, a good work-life balance, and the promise that if they knew how to code, they would always be guaranteed a good job. Today, they are being forced back into the overpriced cities that don't want them there. They are being laid off en masse, and the ones that remain are being told to grind, and they have apparently made programs so good that their CEOs are gleefully talking about a future where entry-level programmers

are completely replaced by AI. Between the Golden Age and the dark ages of tech Bros, there have been three major changes that both caused their massive rise and their current fall. The first problem was that they simply ran themselves out of business. On Friday, the 10th of March in the year 2000, the NASDAQ hit its then all-time peak. Investors were all in on companies that were ready to take advantage of the internet, and the speculative mania was so fierce that just the mention of dot-com and their company filings was enough to send their stock price soaring. Eventually, this all collapsed, and only a select few companies from that era have survived to this day. The reality was that the internet was an amazing technology that would go on to change our lives and facilitate some of the most valuable companies in history, but just putting a normal business on a website wasn't actually revolutionary. What came after was a genuine Golden Era of tech services. The companies

that survived the Doom bubble were actually useful, and the cleansing of the market meant that more talent and investment could go towards supporting companies that actually did provide a good service. Early YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Amazon, and online gaming were all novel and genuinely great services that, if you are as old as me, you probably remember finding them absolutely amazing. There was still money flowing into them, and the tech sector wrote out the global financial crisis better than most. The first iPhone was released in 2007, and even at the height of layoffs in corporate bankruptcies in 2008, people were still lined up around the block to buy the iPhone 3G. You were told that if you learned how to code, you would be sure of a good job, and at the same time, companies like Apple and Google were being named as the most desirable places to work thanks to their relaxed corporate attitude, excellent work-life balance, amazing employee perks, and surprisingly competitive

salaries. Most importantly, these companies were still not the establishment they were. Scrappy startups making products that people actually enjoyed. After the crash, it took the NASDAQ over 15 years to recover from its previous peak. This meant that, thanks to employee stock options, these mid-2000s Tech Bros were making good money, but they would likely still be out-earned by their Finance bro peers, assuming they weren't laid off in 2008. That slowly changed, though, and as these companies grew, more money flowed into the industry, and with more money came more workers, bigger bonuses, stock options, and it went from an alternative industry filled with nerds making products that people enjoyed to the industry making products that would secure funding from a growing pool of investors. They went from the business of adding value through technology to extracting value through monopolies. For a while, you could have a great degree of confidence in becoming filthy rich by putting in a few years at a major Silicon Valley tech company, but all

this relied on a stream of money that wasn't coming from nowhere. Venture Capital, the firms that actually invest in early-stage startups to develop their new technology, never again actually reached the level of funding it did during the dot-com bubble. That was until something changed in 2021. So, it's time to learn how money works to find out how Tech Bros ruined tech for themselves. This week's video is sponsored by Delete Me. Delete Me is a hands-free service designed to remove your personal information from hundreds of data broker sites. These sites collect and sell your data without your consent, making it easy for anyone to buy your personal details. Delete Me privacy experts search for your information across the web, remove it, and continue to monitor and delete it throughout the year, keeping your data secure. Personally, I've been using Delete Me to take control of my online privacy. I was shocked by how much of my information was out there, but thanks to Delete Me, it's being removed from these data broker sites regularly. If you're

serious about protecting your privacy or that of your family. Delete Me even offers plans to cover your loved ones, ensuring their information is protected too. To start safeguarding your personal data, visit joinme.com/hmw and use code HMW for 20% off. Don't wait, protect your information today. As tech companies grew larger and more valuable, the rush to hire more talent heated up by the mid-2010s. If you had a talented developer, you could easily out-earn any other career out of college by working for a company like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or Google, the so-called Fang companies. These businesses all had established platforms, but they still hired tens of thousands of developers and paid them very well for a few reasons. The first was that they were constantly trying to add new features to their core offerings, and even maintaining a platform like YouTube takes a lot of work to keep up to date with customer demands. The homepage of the site today looks

very different from even 5 years ago. There was also an exuberance where newer companies like Uber, Airbnb, Twitch, Snapchat, Tinder, and even WeWork were scaling their operation so fast that they would hire developers before they even had a defined project for them to work on because hiring when they actually needed staff would slow them down. This was part of a relatively new tech industry strategy called Blitz scaling, a not-so-subtle reference to the blitzkrieg of World War II, which was all about capturing as much territory as possible as quickly as possible using new technology before the enemies could respond. Supply lines couldn't keep up, but the hope was that once a territory was captured, the German Army could sort all of that out later. Now, clearly, tech companies are not rolling tanks through Belgium, but they are using the scalability of technology to capture market share in industries like food delivery, taxis, holiday rentals, and online dating as quickly as possible and then sorting out things like what to do with all their staff later on in

an interview published by the Harvard Business Review. Reed Hoffman, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and one of the founders of PayPal and LinkedIn, said that companies that are blitzscaling may need to get as many warm bodies to the door as possible as quickly as you can. Another reason why tech bros are being hired as quickly as possible was that hiring lots of staff was a great way to make sure that they couldn't go to potential competitors, especially startups that could, and I really hate to say this, but disrupt the industries of the big incumbent players. Acquiring competitor companies as they start to take market share could get companies in trouble with the FTC for anti-competitive practices, but there were no rules against denying them to staff that they would need to get their business going in the first place. A report by The Wall Street Journal interviewed tech workers who admitted to being hired to do nothing at all and that the businesses were hoarding developers like Pokémon cards. That made it all worse when high interest

rates reduce. Market certainty and lower customer demand for a lot of these tech products resulted in mass offs across the industry. Businesses that were blitz scaling either shut down or shifted gears to only hire workers they really actually needed. New feature development slowed down, and big established companies didn't need to worry about hoarding workers away from their competitors anymore because nobody was hiring. Artificial intelligence is also already doing a lot of the grunt work that is typically given to new employees. Tech companies, by their nature, are more open to adopting these new technologies, and even replacing just a handful of entry-level developers can save companies millions of dollars every year. So, it really is an ideal environment for automation. This was the second major blow to the tech bros. They traded in the promise of a very stable career for something that has become an incredibly risky game of survival. You can make a lot of money in technology, but your success is going to depend just as much on picking the right

company or startup at the right time to invest in as it is on your own personal skills development. An entry-level developer that started working with Intel 5 years ago had a good chance of being laid off last month with stock options that are worth absolutely nothing. A similarly skilled developer that took a job with Nvidia at the same time, on the other hand, probably never needs to work again in their life. The ones that got lucky go out, and the ones that got let go are sick of playing the stock market with their careers. If they wanted to do that, they would have become Finance Bros. And then there is the biggest problem of all: workers want to be close to job opportunities, and companies want to be close to workers. So, the whole industry has concentrated in just a handful of locations. These cities have become incredibly expensive, and infrastructure has not been able to scale as fast as these companies, which means it's not unusual for Tech workers making six

figures to share a two-bedroom apartment with three other highly paid local workers. Ask me how I know. If you are a tech worker struggling to afford a place to live on a six-figure salary, then there is basically no hope for other workers in these cities, which are still essential to keep society functioning. As a result, big tech cities have not only become expensive places to live; they've also become not particularly nice places to live. Remote work could have alleviated these issues by easing demand in these small markets, but the big tech companies now have a lot more negotiating power over workers who don't want to be another layoff statistic, and they are using that power to mandate a return to office. Even Zoom, the company developing remote working solutions, has pulled its teams back into the office. These problems also don't come with many upsides for locals. The big sell is that these companies offer great jobs, but most of these jobs go to

people who were not local and only moved to the city after they secured a role and then competed with locals for housing and other services. I personally moved to San Francisco from out of state after I got a job at an investment bank, so even though I was technically a finance bro, I was still very much a part of the problem. Other areas have gone from welcoming tech companies opening up operations in their cities to actively pushing back against it, and this all represents a trend which is way larger than just gentrifying entire cities. People just straight up don't like the tech industry anymore, whether they are pressing them out of their homes, collecting their data, hitting them with declining services, making them piss and B models, or threatening their jobs with AI. Most people don't see this as progress anymore, and the tech bros have become just as unpopular as us finance bros. These companies have also bent the rules in their favor to make their particular brand of market power technically legal. Go and watch my video on why everything

is a monopoly again to find out more of the tricks they have used to make that possible. Now I will be writing an article about why some Silicon Valley elites want to build a new city outside of San Francisco. So if you want to read that and get other articles like this as well as these videos a day early, make sure to sign up to keep on learning how money works.

The Rise And Fall of the "Tech Bro"

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How Money Works

Before 2000, high-income careers were dominated by finance, medicine, and law, but tech entrepreneurs then emerged, offering better perks and making more money.

However, 15 years later, these Tech Bros faced layoffs, were forced back into overpriced cities, and now risk being replaced by AI.

The rise and fall of Tech Bros were driven by a speculative mania, the collapse of the dot-com bubble, and the eventual struggle to maintain their business model.

The Impact of the Tech Bubble and Its Aftermath

The tech bubble's collapse led to a market cleansing, allowing talent and investment to flow into genuinely useful companies.

Despite the global financial crisis, tech giants like Apple and Google became desirable employers, offering competitive salaries and great work-life balance.

The industry's shift from adding value through technology to extracting value through monopolies changed the landscape, but venture capital funding never returned to dot-com bubble levels until 2021.

Tech companies, especially the Fang group, surged in hiring talented developers by the mid-2010s, offering lucrative salaries to keep up with customer demands and add new features.

This rapid hiring was driven by a strategy called Blitz scaling, aiming to capture market share quickly in various industries.

The practice of hoarding developers became common, with companies hiring staff before defining their projects, leading to some workers being hired to do nothing at all.

The Impact of Market Changes on Tech Workers

The tech industry has experienced mass layoffs and a shift in hiring practices due to reduced customer demand and market uncertainty.

Automation and artificial intelligence are replacing entry-level positions, making the job market for tech workers increasingly risky.

The concentration of tech companies in a few locations has driven up living costs, making it difficult for even six-figure earners to afford housing, while remote work opportunities have diminished as companies regain negotiating power over employees.

The Impact of Out-of-State Movers in Tech Cities

Out-of-state movers, like the author who relocated to San Francisco for a job, are competing with locals for housing and services, contributing to gentrification.

The tech industry's growing unpopularity is driving cities to push back against their operations, leading to a decline in services and increased resentment.

The author's upcoming article will explore why some Silicon Valley elites want to build a new city outside of San Francisco.