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[...] Don’t dig for gold: Sell shovels to all the suckers who think they’ll get rich digging for gold. To post an ad on Fiverr was to announce one’s status as an easy mark. To hawk get-rich-quick manuals to all those eager Fiverrers, however, was to join the exalted ranks of the shovel merchants. M…

The saddest thing about people like Adrian was that they hadn’t suffered from some outsize ambition. They were only doing what they were told. Barack Obama’s White House had endorsed Silicon Valley’s “learn to code” campaign—it was an official government job-creation program. With the traditional U…

[...] DevWeek, as everyone called it, was basically a weeklong recruitment fair sprinkled with slideshows and panel talks. It was jarring to see employers desperate to hire, not the other way around. In 2010s America, the only place that was always hiring, apart from Silicon Valley, was the local U…

A corporate recruiter explained to me the forces driving the “perks war,” an escalating tit-for-tat of such freebies as steak dinners delivered to employees’ desks, free laundry service, free bikes and bike repair, free concierge service, and of course free drinks. “They might get a twenty-dollar s…

[...] As tech companies established their dominance over the city, more and more mundane aspects of life came to resemble Web-style terms-of-service agreements—unfair, unenforceable, vaguely threatening, and totally rigged. There were even apps for homeless panhandlers to collect Bitcoin, but more …