The Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley

TL;DR

The video contrasts the historic nonconformist culture of tech startups (populated by weirdos, nerds, people who hated having a boss and didn't want to wait in line) with today’s conformist influx where big tech jobs and startup investing have become mainstream status symbols.

Key insights

• In the early 2000s, tech and startups were deeply uncool; Yale graduated 10 CS majors out of 1,200 in 2005; working at a startup after the dot-com crash was considered foolish, attracting only people
• The rise of big tech (Facebook, Google) has placed it alongside finance, consulting, law, and medicine as a structured, status-driven career path for conformists—students study interview techniques an
• Many CS majors study it as a label for career advancement, not because they enjoy coding; in one class, 90% raised hands for studying CS, but 90% of those lowered them when asked if they wanted to cod