Shortly after the terms “996” and “grindcore” entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. One thing about the founder was that he had not taken any weekend leave for more than six months. The woman who joked that she had given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or those employees who started taking off their shoes in the office because, well, if you were at least supposed to be there 12 hours one day, six days a week, won’t you do it wear slippers?
“If you go to a café on a Sunday, everyone is working,” says Sanju Lokuhitige, co-founder of pre-seed-stage AI startup Mythril, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action. Lokuhitige says he works 12 hours a day, seven days a week, except for a few carefully selected social events each week where he can network with other people at the startup. “Sometimes I’m coding all day,” he says. “I don’t have a work-life balance.”
Another startup employee, who came to San Francisco to work for an early-stage AI company, showed me depressing photos from his office: a two-bedroom apartment in the Dogpatch neighborhood. Popular among technical staff. The founder of his startup lives and works in this apartment – from 9 a.m. to late 3 a.m., taking breaks only for DoorDash meals or sleeping, and only leaving the building to take cigarette breaks. The employee (who asked that his name not be used because he still works for this company) described the situation as “terrible.” “I’d heard about 996, but these guys don’t even do 996,” he says. “They’re working 16-hour days.”
Startups have never been particularly glamorous. When I started reporting on the industry a decade ago, people were taking advantage of the new mobile app economy, and Coders were stealing Soylent To stay at your desk longer. Startups were also defined then hustle culture, high-octane energy and the pursuit of growth at all costs – ideas that, to some extent, remain in the bloodstream of the industry.
But in the past year, as the magic dust of artificial intelligence has settled in San Francisco, the excitement among tech workers looks different. Excitement about a new era in tech – and all the money that comes with it – is now tempered by concerns about the industry and the economy. Some activists are pushing for AI, while also questioning whether AI is good for the world. Others are effectively training machines to do their jobs to the best of their ability. And many of the same workers who are racing to build the future are now wondering whether there is a place for them in the future they are building.
The rest of us may be familiar with these concerns, but they are already tangible and keenly felt inside the tech industry. Even the biggest tech companies were once known for pampering employees with on-site massages and barber shops scaled back Perks have raised the expectations of workers. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have each been outspoken about their predictions that AI will replace some junior and mid-level engineers at their companies, and they have, respectively, called for their workforces to be more “skilled” and “extremely hard core“A wave of layoffs has left workers on edge. Tech companies could lay off nearly a quarter million workers worldwide in 2025, according to one report published by RationalFX. In many of those layoffs, AI was has been cited as a main factorEven though the full reason for layoffs is often more complex.
“If you were a software engineer five years ago, you could write your own ticket,” says Mike Robbins, an executive coach who has worked with companies like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Airbnb. Now, the balance of power has shifted away from tech workers, many of whom are feeling anxious about their job performance. “When companies are less afraid about losing employees, they can be a little more forthright in terms of what they want and a little more demanding.”
Robbins, who wrote the book Bring Your Whole Self to Work, was asked to speak to companies and their leaders about topics like employee burnout, well-being and belonging — which were top priorities during the pandemic and in the years immediately following. “Frankly, we’ve stopped talking about all that,” he says. Now, company leaders want advice on topics like change, disruption and uncertainty in the workplace.
Those themes – change, disruption and uncertainty – are each part of the fuel that has driven tech workers to work more hours at a higher intensity. Investment reached artificial intelligence companies record height In 2025, workers are still feeling the shortage like never before.
“It’s definitely something that’s on everyone’s mind,” says Kyle Finken, a software engineer at Mintify, which makes AI tools for developers. “I think a lot of people are kind of worried about, ‘Oh, will I have a job in three years?'”
Despite his fears, Finken, like many other startup employees I spoke to, feels energized by the “extraordinary innovation” happening in artificial intelligence and believes there will still be plenty of jobs for software engineers in the future, even if those jobs look different from today’s pure coding roles. He and other tech workers have described the current moment as a particularly creative and productive time in tech, where people are dedicating extra hours to work, not because their employers demand it, but because of a genuine interest in new tools and capabilities. For example, Gary Tan, head of the famous startup accelerator Y Combinator, recently bragged that he “stayed awake for 19 hoursPlaying with cloud code.
Even those who feel excited by the pace of change acknowledged that AI is rapidly enhancing their work, which could have uncertain consequences for future jobs. “This is certainly not an era of complacency,” says Finken.
One reason to work so many hours is to keep up with the tools and technology that are changing almost every day. If you take the weekend off, you may miss out on a major development, making it hard to keep up with what competitors are doing. Another reason is to have something to show future employers, especially as more junior level jobs are replaced by AI.
“Nobody hires junior developers anymore,” says Mythril co-founder Lokuhitij. Getting a job now requires “doing something cool,” like building a new product or solving a problem that is considered useful by larger companies, he says. Job postings for entry-level tech jobs are set to decline by a third since 2022, according to actually hiring labWhile job postings requiring at least five years of experience have increased. If you’re not working at a startup, you’re missing out on the prerequisites for getting hired in the future.
What does this mean for the rest of us
While economists are skeptical about whether AI will replace most jobs or simply replace them, they agree with the view that AI has already substantially reshaped entry-level work and will continue to do so. A paper A report published by Stanford researchers in November found “substantial declines in employment for early-career workers” in industries most exposed to AI and suggested that sectors that are already experiencing the change could be “canaries in the coal mine” for the rest of the economy. Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, suggests AI could be doomed about half Of All Entry-level jobs in white-collar industries within the next five years.
The head of the International Monetary Fund recently predicted that 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be eliminated or replaced by artificial intelligence, “like a tsunami in the labor market”. In San Francisco, you can already see early signs, as Uber drivers compete with self-driving Vemos, and baristas are replaced by robotic coffee bars. There have also been commercial business services supporting the tech industry negatively affected From layoff. The pressure to grind in the tech world may be an early sign – a harbinger of what many other industries will soon feel.
Executive coach Robbins says companies once looked to Silicon Valley as a model for how they should work, emulating policies like unlimited vacation days or adopting benefits like free lunch at the office.
“Technology and Silicon Valley were idealized in the business world for a long time. Some of that has changed,” he says. “Now, people are not asking me to tell them what is going on in the Valley so that they can embrace it, the same way they were a decade ago.”
Rather than a model of how we should all work, the tech industry may be a harbinger of anxiety and compensation efforts to come for all of us.
