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 steak, but with the extra time they’ve stayed at work, they’ve provided an extra two hundred dollars in value to their employer,” the recruiter said. Thus the seemingly lavish enticements were a way to attract profit-producing programmers, who were in exceedingly high demand, without offering higher salaries. The perks also provided effective cover for the companies’ slave-driving work schedules.

But my intern roommates seemed happy with the arrangement, at least at first. “Everything they say about Google is true,” one intern told me after his orientation at the Googleplex. “There are twenty cafeterias, a gym—everything.” Early every weekday morning, he and the other Googlers in his neighborhood swiped their ID cards to board a chartered bus parked near the BART station, then rode thirty-five miles to Mountain View. They started working onboard the bus, which was equipped with WiFi, and didn’t leave the campus until sometime around 8 p.m., when another bus ferried them home after they ate at the company cafeteria. This was a pretty standard deal at the big Silicon Valley companies. Even rinky-dink startups in SoMa warehouses offered free catering. “The perks, man!” another roommate, a non-Googler, raved after arriving home at 10 p.m. from his first day on the job. “I worked until nine because dinner is free if you work that late … And they’ll pay for your cab home,” he went on. That became his But my intern roommates seemed happy with the arrangement, at least at first. “Everything they say about Google is true,” one intern told me after his orientation at the Googleplex. “There are twenty cafeterias, a gym—everything.” Early every weekday morning, he and the other Googlers in his neighborhood swiped their ID cards to board a chartered bus parked near the BART station, then rode thirty-five miles to Mountain View. They started working onboard the bus, which was equipped with WiFi, and didn’t leave the campus until sometime around 8 p.m., when another bus ferried them home after they ate at the company cafeteria. This was a pretty standard deal at the big Silicon Valley companies. Even rinky-dink startups in SoMa warehouses offered free catering. “The perks, man!” another roommate, a non-Googler, raved after arriving home at 10 p.m. from his first day on the job. “I worked until nine because dinner is free if you work that late … And they’ll pay for your cab home,” he went on. That became his routine, and he never questioned it. Come to think of it, like a lot of his contemporaries, he never questioned anything.

[...] 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.S. Army recruiting center. Hundreds upon hundreds of people had flocked here to look for a better job and still there were not enough applicants to fill all the openings for “Java Legends, Python Badasses, Hadoop Heroes,” and other gratingly childish classifications describing various programming specialties. As exciting as it was to plunge into the bustle of a boomtown hiring hall, something about the ridiculous job titles got under my skin. The West Coast techies were alienated from their neighbors, the natives, not only by habit and custom but also by language. Techies would call themselves just about anything to avoid the stigmatizing label of “worker.” They could only face themselves in the mirror if their business card proved that they were rock stars or ninjas or something romantic and brave and individualistic—anything but the truth, anything but a drone.

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.S. job market still a smoldering charcoal pit after the 2008 crash, computer programming skills were promoted as one sure way to attain the sort of prosperity and stability Americans had over many decades come to expect—nice house, new car, good credit, big TV, full medicine cabinet, all the latest toys, and a retirement plan.

But why, then, were so many programmers who’d “made it” in Silicon Valley scrambling to promote themselves from coder to “founder”? There wasn’t necessarily more money to be had running a startup, and the increase in status was marginal unless one’s startup attracted major investment and the right kind of press coverage. It’s because the programmers knew that their own ladder to prosperity was on fire and disintegrating fast. They knew that well-paid programming jobs would also soon turn to smoke and ash, as the proliferation of learn-to-code courses around the world lowered the market value of their skills, and as advances in artificial intelligence allowed for computers to take over more of the mundane work of producing software. The programmers also knew that the fastest way to win that promotion to founder was to find some new domain that hadn’t yet been automated. Every tech industry campaign designed to spur investment in the Next Big Thing—at that time, it was the “sharing economy”—concealed a larger program for the transformation of society, always in a direction that favored the investor and executive classes.

In the first seven years after the 2008 crash, sixteen million people left the U.S. labor force. And in that same period, thanks to Silicon Valley’s timely opportunism, the country gained an endless bounty of gigs. Tech startups, backed by Wall Street, swept in to offer displaced workers countless push-button moneymaking schemes—what Bloomberg News called “entrepreneurialism-in-a-box.” Need fast cash? Take out a “peer-to-peer” loan, or start a crowdfunding campaign. Need a career? Take on odd jobs as a TaskRabbit or pitch corporate swag as a YouTube “vlogger.” Nine-to-five jobs with benefits and overtime may be in the process of getting disrupted out of existence, but in their place we have the internet, with endless gigs and freelance opportunities, where survival becomes something like a video game—a matter of pressing the right buttons to attain instant gratification and meager rewards.

[...] 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. My Airbnb landlord, I realized, was a shovel merchant. As was the company that rented me server space for website hosting. As were the “startup community organizers” selling tickets to conferences and networking parties. As were the startup awards shows and Hacker News and the whole Silicon Valley economic apparatus promoting the ideal of individual achievement. We startup wannabes were not entrepreneurs. We were suckers for the shovel merchants, who were much cleverer than the thick-skulled “innovators” who did all the work while trading away the rewards. Selling shovels wasn’t the only way to make money in tech, but it was … the Silicon Valley way.