Mike Isaac
In a scene in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” in 2014, a character who had just sold his idea to a fictional tech company that was a thinly veiled analogue to Google encountered some of his new colleagues day drinking on the roof in folding lawn chairs. They were, they said tipsily, essentially being paid to do nothing while earning out — or “vesting” — their stock grants.
The tongue-in-cheek sendup wasn’t far from Silicon Valley’s reality. At the time, young engineers at Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google made the most of what was known as the “Web 2.0” era. Much of their work was building the consumer internet — things like streaming music services and photo-sharing sites. It was a time of mobile apps and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, wanting to give everyone a Facebook email address.
It was also the antithesis of corporate America’s stuffy culture. Engineers held morning meetings sitting in rainbow-colored beanbags, took lunch gratis at the corporate sushi bar and unwound in the afternoon with craft brews from the office keg (nitrogen chilled, natch). And if they got sweaty after a heated office table-tennis tournament, no matter — dry cleaning service was free.
That Silicon Valley is now mostly ancient history. Today, the tech has become harder, the perks are fewer and the mood has turned more serious. The nation’s tech capital has shifted into its artificial intelligence age — some call it the “hard tech” era — and the signs are everywhere. In office conference rooms, hacker houses, third-wave coffee houses or over Zoom meetings, knowledge of terms like neural network, large language model and graphical processing unit has become mandatory.
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