Silicon Valley is in its ‘hard tech’ era

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.

“Rest and vest,” the techies said, in between sips of beer.

The tongue-in-cheek send-up wasn’t far from Silicon Valley’s reality. At the time, young engineers at Facebook, Apple, Netflix…