The Rise And Fall of the "Tech Bro" | How Money Works

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's

1:025G network, and no contract holding you back, plans started $25 a month or get the premium visible plus pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code hack. Make the switch at visible.com. And for more information, visit www.vizbibol.com for details. 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. Techbrows 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 leaching off a broken system that caused people their homes, their jobs, and their futures.

2:05Meanwhile, people loved the idea of hacky-sack playing nerds making millions by actually making stuff that improved our lives. Now, 15 years later, the Techbrows 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 every desk, and everything off. Up to 10,000 workers. There's Larry. CEO, Google. Face something like that. Hi. At their peak, Techbrows enjoyed endless career progression opportunities, options packages that can make them multi-millionaires before they are 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 over-priced 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 A.O.

3:08Between the Golden Age and the Dark Ages of Techbrows, 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 media was so fierce that just the mention of .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 .com 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

4:10great services that if you are as old as me, you probably remember finding them absolutely amazing. There were 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 the 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 .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.

5:11And 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 on 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 invested in early-stage startups to develop their new technology never again actually reached the level of funding it did during the .com bubble. That was until something changed in 2021. So it's time to learn how many works to find out how tech grows ruined tech for themselves. This week's video is sponsored by DeleteMeg. DeleteMeg 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

6:14to buy your personal details. DeleteMeg's 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 DeleteMeg to take control of my online privacy. I was shocked by how much of my information was out there, but thanks to DeleteMeg, it's being removed from these data broker sites regularly. If you're serious about protecting your privacy or that of your family, DeleteMeg even offers plans to cover your loved ones, ensuring their information is protected too. To start safeguarding your personal data, visit joindeleteMeg.com for a slash 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

7:16and paid them very well for a few reasons. The first was that they were constantly doing it. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at nd.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand.

8:16With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's 5G network, and no contract holding you back, plans started $25 a month or get the premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code hack. The Switch at Visible.com Terms apply. 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. This hiring when they actually needed staff would slow them down. This was part of a relatively new tech industry strategy called Blitzcaling, a not-so-subtle reference to the blitzkrieg of World War II which was all about capturing as much territory

9:16as 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 bell jump, 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 in one of the founders of PayPal and LinkedIn so that companies that are Blitzcaling may need to get as many warm bodies through the door as possible as quickly as you can. Another reason why techbrows 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 Bayon Cumban players. Acquiring competitor companies as they start to take market share could get companies in

10:17trouble 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 Pokemon cards. That made it all worse when high interest rates reduced market certainty and lower customer demand for a lot of these tech products resulted in mass layoffs across the industry. Businesses that were Blitzcaling 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. Professional 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

11:20risky 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 agglomerated 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.

12:20Ask 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 have 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 are 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.

13:20Other 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 in bottles 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 that dearly make sure to sign up to keep on learning how money works. Everyone's got a hard question about AI.

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