Working in Silicon Valley, that southern section of the San Francisco Bay area where all the great innovators of industry seem to be situated, is the dream of many a bright eyed college graduate looking to start a career and make a name for themselves, not to mention a major paycheck along the way.

With young trendsetters like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Blake Ross of Firefox having established their headquarters here alongside the likes of Google, Apple, eBay, and Pixar, not to mention the many start ups setting up shop and making bank, it’s easy to see the appeal and prestige that entices this new generation of talent from across America, and the world as well, looking to put their skills and schooling to use.

That being said, it’s equally easy to imagine why so many of them end up having their career dreams crushed and their financial hopes dashed once they arrive.

You see, ever since Silicon Valley began booming again back in 2006, with experienced developers and designers being in short supply but high demand, it caused companies to offer exceptional salaries to the ambitious graduates that proved their worth and tested their mettle.  Those early engineers and idea makers had the pick of the litter when it came to employment, with different companies competing against each other to snag the talent for themselves, while others went off on their own and found great success doing things their own way.  This unprecedented potential led to a major payoff for all involved, reestablishing the status and success of Silicon Valley that had subsided after the dot.com bubble burst in the late nineties, but increasing the egos and paychecks of the professions that did so as well.

In many ways, it was a modern day equivalent to the California Gold Rush of old, with word of the great opportunity ripe for the taking spreading all across the country, leading so many to head west all assured they’d strike it rich.  And yes, in both cases there were those lucky few who achieved unprecedented levels of success, with young twenty somethings who’d barely finished their schooling reaching net worths in the six figure range.  People were becoming business owners and billionaires overnight, at least in the eye of the public.  It was the new frontier and everyone wanted to stake their claim, especially with the recession starting to hit.

With layoffs on the rise as the economy started to drop, and an older generation of workers losing their jobs while the new generation was just beginning to figure out what to do with their lives, the inflated earnings of the new information age looked too good to pass up.  Out of work parents pressured their children into attending universities and earning degrees in this hot new field, desperate to save their sons and daughters from the apparent obsolescence causing their own unemployment.

Unfortunately, this only served to create a surplus in engineers and developers, none of whom had any real experience in the field but all of whom were after the same jobs, and in the same place no less.  And, much like the original California Gold Rush, for every success story of the one who made it big, there are countless others who gave it their all and got nothing out of it, promised financial stability and job security only to discover the land had already been mined dry.

I discussed millennial’s and their overblown career expectations in a previous blog, going into detail about the difficulties they face and the flawed perspectives it gives them, but the Silicon Valley situation here is a prime example of what’s wrong with this industry and the workforce going into it.  These young graduates are leaving school with no experience to their names but massive debt on their shoulders, expecting to find 100k salaries waiting for the out west before learning the bitter truth and eventually lowering their expectations.

Likewise, the major companies and influential investors of Silicon Valley are learning that blindly throwing money at flashy start ups without viable business models, or taking on all these unseasoned employees, is only going to drive them to another bubble burst, making the already difficult center of innovation that much harder to break into, to say nothing of the overpriced housing and unforgiving traffic that awaits those who try.

The rise of internet degrees and boot camps has only increased the issue, making a fancy eduction less important in the eyes of employers, and hard earned first hand experience all the more a deciding factor.  In that regard, you could say nothing has changed, it’s still incredible quality that drives success and gets the results we all read about in the papers, but with the excessive quantity flooding the field and dragging it down as it now is, the papers may have less success stories for us to read about in the years to come.