The video explores the evolution of tech industry careers and how the once revered "Tech Bros" have now lost their luster. Describing the shift from traditional career paths like finance and medicine to tech opportunities, it highlights how individuals in the tech sector initially enjoyed lucrative opportunities and societal acceptance. However, over time, the very practices that led to their rise such as "blitz scaling" and monopolistic tendencies have resulted in a public disapproval comparable to the disdain previously held for "Finance Bros."

It’s an insightful journey through major shifts in the tech industry landscape. From being hailed as innovative disruptors providing practical solutions and products, to becoming symbols of gentrification and social disconnect, the video addresses how tech workers' perceived privilege turned from an advantage into a liability. Amidst rising living costs in tech-centric cities, mass layoffs, and AI replacing entry-level jobs, it examines how the mismatch between industry growth and urban infrastructural capacity affects societal well-being.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. speculative mania ['spɛkjələtɪv] ['meɪniə] - (noun phrase) - An intense but irrational enthusiasm for speculative investments, often leading to inflated asset values. - Synonyms: (investment craze, bubble, financial frenzy)

...the speculative mania was so Fierce that just the mention of do com and their company filings was enough to send their stock price soaring...

2. nasdaq ['næzdæk] - (noun) - A global electronic marketplace for buying and selling securities, known for its high-tech stocks. - Synonyms: (stock exchange, market, bourse)

...Friday the 10th of March in the year 2000 the nasdaq hit its then all time Peak...

3. monopolies [məˈnɑpəliz] - (noun) - Exclusive control over a commodity or service in a particular market, often leading to anti-competitive practices. - Synonyms: (domination, control, exclusivity)

...extracting value through monopolies...

4. venture capital ['vɛntʃər] ['kæpɪtəl] - (noun) - A form of private equity investment provided to startups and small businesses with potential for long-term growth. - Synonyms: (investment, funding, capital)

...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 do com bubble...

5. blitz scaling [blɪts] [skeɪlɪŋ] - (noun) - A startup growth strategy of capturing market share quickly by scaling operations rapidly. - Synonyms: (rapid growth, accelerated expansion, aggressive scaling)

...relatively new tech industry strategy called blitz scaling...

6. gentrification ['dʒɛntrɪfɪˌkeɪʃən] - (noun) - The process of renovating and improving a district so that it conforms to middle-class taste, often displacing lower-income families. - Synonyms: (urban renewal, revitalization, redevelopment)

...way larger than just gentrifying entire cities people just straight up don't like the tech industry anymore...

7. aerated ['ɛrˌeɪtɪd] - (verb) - Distribute or arrange (people or businesses) throughout a small number of locations. - Synonyms: (dispersed, spread, circulated)

...so the whole industry has aerated in just a handful of locations...

8. grunt work [ɡrənt] [wɜrk] - (noun phrase) - Unskilled, repetitive, or mundane work. - Synonyms: (menial labor, drudgery, routine tasks)

...artificial intelligence is also already doing a lot of the grunt work that is typically given to new employees...

9. exuberance [ɪgˈzjubərəns] - (noun) - The quality of being full of energy, excitement, and cheerfulness. - Synonyms: (enthusiasm, zeal, energy)

...There was also an exuberance where newer companies like uber Airbnb twitch Snapchat Tinder and even wework were scaling their operation so fast...

10. incumbent [ɪnˈkʌmbənt] - (noun / adjective) - A person or business currently holding a particular position or place in the market. - Synonyms: (current, reigning, existing)

...the industries of the big incumbent players...

The Rise And Fall of the "Tech Bro"

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 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 in mass, 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 do 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 rode 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 do com 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 do com bubble. That was until something changed in 2021.

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 operations 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 blitz Krieg 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 blitz scaling 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 the staff 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 layoffs 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 aerated 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, but 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 move to the city after they secure a role and then compete 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 pricing 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.

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