But Judge’s frustration with his early experience in the white-collar work force had only temporarily receded, and it would soon come rushing back in the form of “Office Space.” The 1999 film reprised the characters from the “Milton” short and expanded on the theme it explored: the way work not only robs you of your free will but also refashions that will in its own image. It’s such a brutal portrayal of workplace misery that its most useful points of comparison date back to when office culture was first unleashed on humanity. Many liken it to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (a story Judge has not yet read), and I still recall a high-school English teacher invoking the movie in an effort to impress on the class what Franz Kafka’s life was like, toiling away by day at an insurance company in the twilight of the Hapsburg empire.

If you set aside his long-running TV show “King of the Hill,” which is much too loving to be considered satire, Judge’s corpus of work cleaves neatly into two pieces. In one, people are driven nearly to ruin in their efforts to escape the crush of immense managerial apparatuses (“Office Space,” “Extract”). In the other, we see the opposite — imbeciles left completely and terrifyingly to their own devices (“Beavis and Butt-Head,” “Idiocracy”). “Silicon Valley,” remarkably, fuses both of these impulses. The tech world it skewers is the most dynamic sector of our economy, possibly representing the greatest concentration of brainpower and capital ever seen in human history, creating products that insinuate their control into every last corner of our lives. And yet it’s nevertheless lousy with man-children who seem to want nothing more than the ability to prolong adolescence, theirs and ours alike, and have the means and the license and the asinine product ideas to do so. If “Idiocracy” imagined that America would one day amuse itself into ruin, then “Silicon Valley” offers a compelling case for how we’ll go about doing it — not in spite of our best and brightest, but because of them.

On a Tuesday morning in February, I found myself in a nearly empty Los Angeles Convention Center, where the “Silicon Valley” production team had fashioned about one-third of one hall into a mock industry convention. Staged for a scene in the show’s coming season, the event had 28 booths, among them Pied Piper’s and, across from it, one for a fictitious mobile game. The other 26, however, were completely real, with many staffed by actual employees. Square was there, along with Roku and Oculus and Nest, which brought a fire truck that had been painted baby blue by the guys from “Pimp My Ride.” There were companies I’d never heard of, like FLIR (thermal imaging), Mophie (portable chargers) and Equinix (“Interconnection to connect, protect and power the digital world”). A drone company called DJI had set up what can perhaps best be described as a go-go dancer cage for one of its quadcopters.

Looming above me was a 15-foot-tall four-legged mech, a full-body prosthesis fashioned from trellised white steel beams and hydraulic pumps. Behind it was a red R.V. with a helicopter on top of it, and all around were high-definition TVs playing promotional loops of other high-definition TVs installed in sumptuous settings. An employee of the company responsible for all this, Furrion, was explaining to me and a few “Silicon Valley” writers how this grab bag of contraptions all fit under the Hong Kong-based firm’s umbrella. Furrion had been involved mainly in yachts and then high-end audiovisual installations before deciding to “move toward lithium technology,” which led to robotics and to the mech, which he claimed, rather incredibly, could run 20 miles per hour. “The military actually wanted to, uh, arm it,” he told us. “But that’s not — we don’t — you know, we want to stay away from the military.” Then he paused and hedged: “As much as we can.” (Later, he said it was a previous project of his own that a military contractor had been curious about — a giant mechanical spider he created for Burning Man.)

In the middle of all this was Judge, whose appearance sits somewhere in the overlap between “aging surfer” (which he is) and “off-duty cop” (which he is certainly not). At 55, he’s trim with a powerful-looking upper body and somehow presents a sense of calm despite quivering with nervous energy. He sat at his monitors, eyes darting back and forth between the two feeds, legs pumping like pistons, chewing gum so furiously that I could, at times, see the muscles in his temples pulsating like an exposed heart. He has the habit, when making decisions, of clutching his skull as if it might otherwise split open. Anxious as he seemed, he never raised his voice and still laughed at the bits he liked, even on repeat viewings. (I asked him later, half-kidding, if directing stresses him out to the point that he still harbors fantasies about leaving the work force completely. “Oh, no, I do,” he said. “Totally.”)

The portrayal of the tech world on “Silicon Valley” might scan as absurd to anyone outside the industry, but within the valley the show is known and appreciated for its verisimilitude. Not only does it have a technical adviser in the writers’ room and on set; it also has a small research staff. Judge and Berg frequently meet with a network of contacts in the valley for material, in subjournalistic fashion, offering anonymity or compositing as cover to protect their sources. Thomas Middleditch, who plays Richard, told me he gets two responses from people in tech: They either love the show for its accuracy or find it so accurate that it’s too stressful to watch.