실리콘밸리 테크 브라더스의 흥망성쇠

### 테크 브라더스의 흥망성쇠 황금기부터 암울한 현실까지
* 👔 2000년 이전에는 금융, 의료, 법률, 경영 분야의 전통적인 고소득 직업은 공식적인 외모를 갖춰야 했지만, **기술 붐으로 인해 이러한 규범을 무시하는 새로운 백만장자**가 등장했습니다.
* 💻 혁신적인 제품을 만들면서 더 나은 혜택과 일과 삶의 균형을 누리는 **테크 브라더의 등장**은 경기 침체기에 경영진과 은행원을 둘러싼 부정적인 인식과 극명한 대조를 이룹니다.
* 📉 그러나 지난 15년 동안 많은 테크 브라더들은 **페이스북과 구글 같은 기업들이 자동화와 인공지능을 우선시**하기 시작하면서 해고와 업계의 변화에 직면했고, 이로 인해 고용 안정성이 위협받고 있습니다.
* 📊 기술 업계는 호황과 불황의 주기를 경험했고, **2000년 나스닥이 정점을 찍은 후 붕괴**되면서 가장 가치 있는 기업만 살아남을 수 있는 시장 정화가 이루어졌습니다.
* 💰 2010년대 중반에는 기업들이 시장 점유율을 확보하기 위해 공격적으로 인재를 채용하면서 **인재 확보 경쟁이 치열**해졌지만, 이러한 전략은 **과잉 고용**으로 이어졌고 결국 시장 상황이 바뀌면서 **대량 해고**로 이어졌습니다.
* 🏙 기술 기업이 비싼 도시에 집중되면서 근로자들의 생활 여건이 어려워졌고, 많은 사람들이 **높은 연봉에도 불구하고 숙소를 공유**해야 하는 상황이 발생하여 기술 산업에 대한 현지의 분노가 더욱 악화되었습니다.
* 🔄 원격 근무를 통해 이러한 문제를 일부 완화할 수 있었지만, 기업들은 이제 **사무실로의 복귀**를 추진하고 있으며, 직원들은 빠르게 변화하는 환경 속에서 **갇힌 느낌과 저평가된 느낌**을 받고 있습니다.
* 📰 기술 산업에 대한 대중의 인식이 바뀌면서 한때 **테크 브라더스에 대한 인기가 높았던 이미지**가 약해졌고, 이는 한때 **파이낸스 브라더스에 대한 정서**를 반영하는 인기 하락으로 이어졌습니다.

테크 브라더스는 유명 혁신가에서 인기 없는 인물로 전락했고, 업계가 발전함에 따라 해고와 조사에 직면하기도 했습니다.

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

2000년 이전에는 금융, 의료, 법조계가 고소득 직업을 주도했지만, 그 후 기술 기업가들이 등장하면서 더 나은 혜택과 더 많은 돈을 벌 수 있는 직업이 등장했습니다.

그러나 15년이 지난 지금, 테크 브라더들은 해고에 직면하고 물가가 비싼 도시로 밀려났으며 이제는 인공지능에 의해 대체될 위기에 처해 있습니다.

테크 브라더스의 흥망성쇠는 투기 광풍과 닷컴 버블의 붕괴, 그리고 결국 비즈니스 모델을 유지하기 위한 고군분투로 이어졌습니다.

기술 버블의 붕괴는 시장 정화로 이어져 진정으로 유용한 기업에 인재와 투자가 유입될 수 있었습니다.

글로벌 금융 위기에도 불구하고 애플과 구글 같은 거대 기술 기업은 경쟁력 있는 급여와 일과 삶의 균형을 제공하는 매력적인 고용주가 되었습니다.

기술을 통한 부가가치 창출에서 독점을 통한 가치 창출로 업계가 전환하면서 환경이 바뀌었지만, 벤처 캐피탈 펀딩은 2021년까지 닷컴 버블 수준으로 돌아가지 못했습니다.

기술 인재 러시와 블리츠 스케일링

2010년대 중반까지 기술 기업, 특히 Fang 그룹은 고객의 요구에 부응하고 새로운 기능을 추가하기 위해 고액의 연봉을 제시하며 유능한 개발자를 채용하는 사례가 급증했습니다.

이러한 빠른 채용은 다양한 산업 분야에서 빠르게 시장 점유율을 확보하기 위한 블리츠 스케일링이라는 전략에 따른 것이었습니다.

기업들이 프로젝트를 확정하기도 전에 직원을 고용하는 등 개발자를 비축하는 관행이 일반화되면서 일부 직원은 아무것도 하지 않고 고용되는 경우도 발생했습니다.

시장 변화가 기술 인력에 미치는 영향

기술 업계는 고객 수요 감소와 시장의 불확실성으로 인해 대량 해고와 고용 관행의 변화를 경험했습니다.

자동화와 인공지능이 초급 직무를 대체하면서 기술직 근로자의 고용 시장은 점점 더 위험해지고 있습니다.

기술 기업이 몇몇 지역에 집중되면서 생활비가 상승하여 6자리 수 소득자조차도 주택을 마련하기 어려워졌고, 기업이 직원에 대한 협상력을 회복하면서 원격 근무 기회도 줄어들었습니다.

기술 도시에서 타주 이사가 미치는 영향

일자리를 찾아 샌프란시스코로 이주한 필자처럼 타주에서 온 사람들이 현지인들과 주택과 서비스를 놓고 경쟁하면서 젠트리피케이션의 원인이 되고 있습니다.

기술 산업의 인기가 높아짐에 따라 도시에서는 이에 대한 반발이 커지고 있으며, 이는 서비스 감소와 분노의 증가로 이어지고 있습니다.

다음 글에서는 일부 실리콘 밸리 엘리트들이 샌프란시스코 외곽에 새로운 도시를 건설하려는 이유를 살펴볼 예정입니다.