More and more men in the software development industry are undergoing radical and expensive surgery to increase their size by three to six centimeters. The trick: To do so, both femurs must be broken. GQ enters the burgeoning world of leg lengthening.

“A lot of people working in the tech industry are swooning over leg-lengthening surgeries.”

says renowned Las Vegas plastic surgeon Kevin Debiparshad, who specializes in this kind of procedure.

Here’s how the procedure works. The doctor breaks the patients’ femurs, or thigh bones, and inserts metal nails into them that can be adjusted. The nails are extended a tiny bit every day for three months with a magnetic remote control.
Slow bone lengthening and leg healing can take months. One software engineer says he spent the first three months after his surgery alone in his apartment, and during that time he ordered take-out food to get from six feet to six feet.

The procedure cost between $70,000 and $150,000 depending on whether the patient wanted to grow 3, 4, 5 or 6 inches.

” Sometimes I joke that I could open a tech company. I have about 20 software engineers doing this procedure right now and they’re here in Vegas. Yesterday there was a girl from PayPal. I have patients from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. I’ve had several patients from Microsoft.”,

Debiparshad told GQ.

The surgeon said he doesn’t recommend the procedure for athletes because it can diminish their abilities, and many of the patients GQ spoke to say they don’t want to tell people they had the procedure done.