The Rise And Fall of the 'Tech Bro'

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#tech #business #career

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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 where finance, medicine, law or senior company management if you were lucky.

But then… just a few years later at around about the same time as those people in their fancy suits were blowing up the global economy a new breed of millionaire was entering the mainstream.

They replaced the puffer vests and Bloomberg terminals with flip flops and vim terminals…

Tech bro’s 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 rightfully 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…

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 this all relied on a stream of money that wasn’t coming from nowhere…

Venture capital, the firms that ACTUALLY invest in early-stage start-ups to develop their new technology NEVER again actually reached the level of financing 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 Bro’s ruined tech for themselves…

[BetterSubstance]

The culture around tech evolved from being counter-corporate to becoming just another corporate monster. Tech bros started off as the antithesis of Wall Street greed, yet ended up playing the same game with VC funding, IPOs, and ultimately prioritizing profits over innovation. The cycle just repeats in different industries.

[gogogomes]

When your grandma knows about some stock options it's already too late, when a "Bro" fella enters a field of work, it is also too late.

[TechInfluence]

AI about to take my job of writing these comments someday 😢

[tomful]

Basically a tech bro is when the Dunning-Kruger effect meets technology.

[howtoappearincompletely]

I'm glad you noted how loathesome a cliché the verb "disrupt" has become.

[abqmalenurse]

The irony is that tech bros are the ones who have/are developing AI, effectively making themselves obsolete.
All the living wage workers being laid off is a blow to the economy.

[watchdealer]

Tech bros are going through it, but my my neighbor is Goldman "finance bro." He was rich in the 90s and he's even richer today. Haha!

[iTzDritte]

I feel attacked. I do in fact use a vim terminal and make >$1M/year. I kept my lifestyle costs low and saved up during the boom times. My heart goes out to the kids starting in the industry today. It’s sad how much harder it is for the kids starting these days.

[hotrodhunk]

They told truck drivers to learn to code.

That's exactly what I did and of course the minute I get some IT and programming certifications then the whole bottom falls out of the market...

At this point I don't even want to waste my time learning another skill by the time I learn it AI will take over it anyway.

Maybe I'll learn how to repair robot or something 😂😂😂

[Azeteck_casual]

That's why you should never forget you are human. Not a "Schublade". Not a label people put you in

[elijahk]

I've been reading a great book called 'Technofuedalism' by Yanis Varoufakis which touches on this subject. It describes how we moved from finance-dominant neoliberalism to a tech-dominant system that surpasses capital/labor dynamics and uses technology to invade every aspect of people's lives. This explains how tech workers have basically become an elite class in cities where even they can barely afford to get by.

[azirious]

Economic environment does not care about credentials or performance

[sephondranzer]

Should be FAMG (Microsoft instead of Netflix). Never ceases to amaze me how we involve Netflix in conversations they honestly don’t really belong as much in…

[Ratnik.Sjenke]

My big issue with someone who works in tech is all the jobs are located in like four or five over priced cities. Tech would be way better if those companies where scattered all over the US

[lizp]

i feel like you really missed out on the opportunity to make one of the boxes in the 0:00 still frame a cow-patterned box with no logo. but also i can't remember the last time i saw a cow box that wasn't hold random stuff in someone's garage.

[NGC-gudz]

I am 20 years into a tech career, work for a startup I was employee 6. I am making a salary above $300k with equity in the tens of millions. Things are going great, posting growth over 50% over the last year, 120% over the last two years. However, technology is steamrolling entry level. "Learn to code" was something you could do 10 or 20 years ago, today you need to be very gifted to get a decent entry level job by wages commanded in first world countries. Consider infrastructure as code. I don't need anyone to provision compute resources, I write code to do that. Bye bye IT guys setting up machines or virtual machines, that is just code now.

Tech bros are doing just fine, however the industry is mature, and commoditization is taking its toll.

[ayde]

Funny, Patrick Boyle just released a video on Tech in Finance less than 10 minutes after you.

[Fushiguro_Daniel]

print("Hello fellow programmers XP")

[EyeKnowRaff]

Those lines of code can't do much without electricity. Bah, I'm sure you'll do great on coding only.

[sheepyspawn]

Tech bros be taking the new buses to work