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 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 every desk and every day. Amazon is set to lay off up to 10,000 workers. There's Larry, CEO of Google, say something.

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 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 dotcom 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 dotcom 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 dotcom 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 dotcom bubble. That was until something changed in 2021.