If you’re even remotely involved in the tech world, you’ve probably heard the buzzy term “Silicon Slopes.” It refers to a stretch of land in Utah’s Wasatch Front region that’s grown into a hub for the tech industry.
When I visited the area in January, I realized it wasn’t always this way. After touring modern tech offices and speaking with longtime locals, I learned exactly how this once-rural area became the Silicon Slopes.
I also saw firsthand why it’s top-rated for its work environment. One of the offices I toured came with really cool perks, such as being able to rent a mountain bike to use on the campus’ nearby trails.
The Silicon Slopes is a place where techies collaborate in modern, glass offices with a mountain backdrop.
The roughly 50-mile area, including Salt Lake City, Park City, Draper, Provo, and Lehi, among other towns, is home to over 1,000 tech companies.
Longtime Utah residents say they remember a very different Wasatch Front.
Saul Andrade, BambooHR’s senior events manager, told Business Insider he’s lived in Utah for about 30 years and has spent the past decade living in the Silicon Slopes. Driving to Salt Lake City as a kid, he said the area was mostly farmland before the boom.
“Nowadays, when my wife and I drive by, we look over, and we just cannot believe how much it’s grown,” Andrade said. “There was a time when we got pumpkins at this farm. There’s no farm now — not even a trace of the farm. It’s all living accommodations and complexes.”
Mark Overdevest, a Sotheby’s real-estate agent, moved to the Wasatch Front in 2004 when “property values were very low.”
“It seemed like a great place to invest,” he told BI. “And to have access to such great skiing, I just felt like it was too good to be true.”
Over the years, he’s seen many modern luxury homes with glass and steel architectural designs pop up in Salt Lake City as residents have moved in from California, Texas, and Illinois.
Hosting the 2002 Olympics pushed Salt Lake City infrastructure forward, putting the Wasatch Front on everyone’s radar.
When Michelle Ercanbrack, a lifelong Utah resident who has spent her entire career working in tech, found out that Salt Lake City would be hosting the 2002 Olympics, she remembers her grandma saying, “The secret’s out,” in reference to Utah’s beautiful landscapes and world-class skiing getting global attention.
The tech boom started with a startup acquisition in 2009.
In 2009, Adobe purchased the Utah tech startup Omniture for $1.8 billion and built a campus in Lehi, which opened three years later.
Ercanbrack said that a company as well-known as Adobe was a big deal for Utah.
“The Omniture acquisition was the tipping point in my mind for when the tech space, the innovation space, and overall the economy of Utah began to shift,” she told BI. “That showed an investment in our state and in the potential innovation of the people that lived here.”
To Ercanbrack, the Adobe campus is “the heart of the Silicon Slopes.” She added, “Everything is congregated or radiated around it.”
Other big companies followed.
Utah drew tech giants with its tax incentives for businesses. In 2020, the state loosened its licensing regulations, making it one of the easiest states to launch a new business in.
Companies including Google, PayPal, Overstock.com, and Goldman Sachs, among others, now have a footprint in the Silicon Slopes.
A decade after Adobe’s acquisition, the pandemic drove up wealth and population.
The pandemic furthered Utah’s growth as more Silicon Valley tech companies moved to the state.
“Remote work opened up a lot of opportunities for people to move around, but also, the pandemic was when a lot of economies were struggling, and Utah’s economy remained exceptionally resilient,” Ercanbrack said. “So people were willing to relocate for jobs.”
Overdevest said the wealthy have gotten wealthier since then.
“Their wealth has just ballooned with the pandemic,” he said, adding that many of his clients in Salt Lake City are young techies and entrepreneurs.
During my recent trip to the Silicon Slopes, I got an inside look at what the tech scene is like today.
In 2024, WalletHub ranked Utah’s work environment the best in the country.
After touring a modern tech office building in Draper, which sits between Salt Lake City and Lehi, it was easy to see why.
“I think Draper is such a growing location because it’s right between those two major business hubs,” Ercanbrack said. “It connects Lehi to what’s happening in Salt Lake.”
The building is owned by the online education company Pluralsight.
In 2020, Pluralsight built the corporate campus, which houses several other tech companies.
The human resources software company BambooHR is also headquartered in the building.
Pluralsight rents out a portion of the building to BambooHR. I toured offices for both companies, which offer hybrid work environments for their employees.
Most of the building’s first floor is a communal space. One side is filled with dining and refreshments.
From a coffee shop and soda fountains to premade meals and restaurants with cooked-to-order food, there was no shortage of breakfast and lunch options for employees.
Employees can order on an app or use one of the smart tablets set up in the café area.
The other side is a coworking space filled with long tables, cozy nooks, and plenty of natural light.
“The common area is a great place to mingle with some of your coworkers that you may not see because they work on a different floor or people from the other companies,” Andrade said. “I get to network and create new connections.”
Pluralsight product marketer Austin Bagley agreed.
“It’s fun to be in a place where it’s vibrant, it’s bright, and I can talk to people,” Bagley said.
There’s also a communal gym, a pickleball court, and rentable mountain bikes for employees to use on the trails just outside the building.
All the employees I spoke with described Utah as an active place and said they feel like their campus reflects and supports that lifestyle.
Bagley said that he bought a bike after joining Pluralsight to ride the nearby trails with other employees in the summers.
Both offices had open-concept floor plans.
Bagley has been at Pluralsight for six years and said the new office has a different feel than their old one.
“The first office was similar but a lot smaller,” Bagley said. “It felt like every day, you’d walk in, and there’d be less space from desks and things getting crammed in.”
Bagely said in this new building, he gets to enjoy the open-concept floor plan.
“It makes it a little bit more of a community versus just hanging out in the office all day by yourself,” he said, adding that he likes having the option of moving from his desk to comfy couches around the office.
Both offices also have single and group-sized meeting rooms.
Employees book blocks of time for the rooms. At Pluralsight, room availability varies, Bagley said.
“I have a number of colleagues here, but I also have people on my team in Florida and Pennsylvania, and so a lot of the work we do is still remote,” he said. “This office will go from being fairly quiet to then having weeks where you can’t find any meeting room because we have a lot of people who travel and spend time here on-site.”
Employees at each office had fun, unique ways to take breaks.
From pool and shuffleboard to arcade games and ping-pong tables, there was plenty to take a break within these two offices.
BambooHR was especially impressive with its golf simulator.
“Sometimes you see amenities in an office, and they just sit there like show and tell,” Bagley said. “I’m impressed that people here actually use it.”
Employees at both companies seem motivated to collaborate in person
“The first thing that strikes me about Pluralsight is how collaborative it is,” Bagley said.
At most jobs, Bagley said he’s talked to co-workers across two to three different functions within the company. At Pluralsight, he said he communicates between 15 to 20.
“You get to connect to a lot of different people and understand a lot of different contexts that move the work forward,” he said, adding that an additional perk is “you end up becoming friends with a lot more people.”
Andrade, who goes in most days of the workweek, said he, too, appreciates the workplace environment at BambooHR.
“The flexibility where you can work remote and then come into the office and be able to build those relationships with some of your coworkers doesn’t compare to working remotely full-time,” he said. “And doing it in a beautiful building in a centralized location makes it even better.”
Growth has come with some challenges, but locals predict that the Silicon Slopes will continue flourishing.
Ercanbrack and Overdevest both think the Silicon Slopes will continue to grow.
“Just driving along the interstate, you’ll see the amount of building that’s happening — and a lot of it is housing,” Ercanbrack said. “The amount of apartments and condos has been significant, and it’s been needed because, like everywhere else, there’s an entire generation of millennials that need a place to live.”
Ercanbrack remains hopeful that although growth has caused housing costs to skyrocket — in 2022, ABC4 Utah reported that housing was 200% more expensive than in 2000 — Utah will still be a great place to live and work.
“I just have this sense that communities are like plants — they’re either growing or dying,” she said. “And I’m grateful to live in a place that is experiencing such growth.”
The post I visited offices in the Silicon Slopes and learned why Utah’s booming tech hub is top-rated for creating workplaces that lure employees in appeared first on Business Insider.
