Shortly after the terms “996” and “grindcore” entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening in startups at the time. San Franciscozero point for the artificial intelligence economy. There was that of the founder who had not taken a weekend for more than six months. The woman who joked that she gave up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking off their shoes in the office because, well, if you had to stay there at least 12 hours A day, six days a week, wouldn’t you rather be wear slippers?
“If you go to a coffee shop on a Sunday, everyone is working,” says Sanju Lokuhitige, co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed AI startup, which moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action. Lokuhitige says he works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, not including a few carefully selected social events each week where he can network with other people at startups. “Sometimes I code all day,” he says. “I don’t have a work-life balance.”
Another startup employee, who came to San Francisco to work for a young AI company, showed me dreary photos of his office: a two-bedroom apartment in the Dogpatch neighborhood popular with tech workers. His startup’s founders live and work in this apartment — from 9 a.m. until 3 a.m., stopping only to pick up DoorDash meals or to sleep, and leaving the building only to take smoke breaks. The employee (who asked not to be named since he still works for the company) called the situation “horrible.” “I had heard of the 996, but these guys don’t even do the 996,” he said. “They work 16 hours a day.”
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 drank Soylent stay longer at their desk. Startups were then also defined by restless culture, high octane energy and the pursuit of growth at all costs – ideas that, to some extent, have remained in the blood of the industry.
But in the last year, as the magic dust of artificial intelligence has settled in San Francisco, the mood among tech workers seems different. Excitement about a new technological era – and all the money that comes with it – is now tempered by concerns about the industry and the economy. Some workers are going all-in on AI while wondering if all this AI is good for the world. Others effectively train machines to do their jobs better than they can. And many of the same workers who are rushing to build the future are now wondering if the future they are building has a place for them.
The rest of us may be aware of these anxieties, but they are already tangible and keenly felt within the tech industry. Even the biggest tech companies, once known for pampering their employees with on-site massages and hair salons, have reduced benefits because they raised workers’ expectations. 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 have respectively called for their workforces to be more “efficient” and “more efficient.”extremely hard core” as waves of layoffs put strain on employees. Tech companies will lay off about a quarter of a million workers worldwide in 2025, according to a study. report published by RationalFX. In many of these layoffs, AI was cited as main factoreven if the reasons for layoffs are often more complex.
“If you were a software engineer five years ago, you could kind of write your ticket,” says Mike Robbins, an executive coach who has worked with companies like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Airbnb. Today, the balance of power has shifted away from tech workers, many of whom feel anxious about their job performance. “When companies are less afraid of losing employees, then they can be a little more upfront about what they want and be a little more demanding.”
Robbins, who wrote the book Bring Your Whole Self to Work, was once invited to speak with companies and their leaders about topics such as burnout, well-being and belonging – top priorities in the years since and shortly after the pandemic. “Frankly, we stopped talking about all that,” he said. Now business leaders are looking for advice on topics such as change, disruption and uncertainty in the workplace.
These themes – change, disruption and uncertainty – are each part of the fuel that has driven tech workers to put in more hours, at a higher intensity. Investment in artificial intelligence companies reaches records in 2025, and yet workers are feeling a shortage like never before.
“It’s definitely something that’s on everyone’s mind,” says Kyle Finken, a software engineer at Mintlify, which creates an AI tool for developers. “I think a lot of people worry like, ‘Oh, am I going to have a job in three years?'”
Despite his fears, Finken, like many other startup employees I’ve spoken with, feels energized by the “extraordinary innovation” happening in the field of 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 characterized the current moment as a particularly creative and productive time in tech, where people are putting in extra hours at work not because their employers require it, but out of genuine interest in new tools and capabilities. For example, Garry Tan, the boss of the famous startup accelerator Y Combinator, recently boasted of having “I stayed awake for 19 hours» having fun with Claude Code.
Even those excited by the pace of change recognized that AI was rapidly augmenting their work, in ways that could have uncertain consequences for the jobs of tomorrow. “This is certainly not a time of complacency,” Finken says.
One of the reasons we work so many hours is to keep up with the tools and technologies that evolve almost every day. If you take the weekend off, you risk missing a major development, making it harder to keep up with what competitors are doing. Another reason is to have something to show future employers, especially as lower-level jobs are replaced by AI.
“No one hires junior developers anymore,” says Lokuhitige, co-founder of Mythril. To get a job now, you have to “do something cool,” he says, like creating a new product or solving a problem recognized as useful by big companies. Job postings for entry-level tech jobs have fallen by a third since 2022, according to Indeed’s recruitment laboratorywhile job offers requiring at least five years of experience have increased. If you’re not working at a startup, you’re missing the prerequisites to get hired in the future.
What this means for the rest of us
While economists debate whether AI will replace most jobs or simply change them, they seem to agree that AI has already reshaped much of entry-level work and will continue to do so. A paper published by Stanford researchers in November found “substantial declines in employment for early-career workers” in sectors exposed to AI and suggested that areas where changes are already underway could be like a “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of the economy. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested that AI could eliminate about half of all entry-level jobs in white-collar industries over the next five years.
The head of the International Monetary Fund recently predicted that 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be eliminated or transformed thanks to artificial intelligence, “like a tsunami hitting the job market”. In San Francisco, we can already see the first signs of this, as Uber drivers compete with autonomous Waymos and baristas are replaced by robotic coffee bars. Professional business services that support the technology industry have also been negatively affected through layoffs. The pressure from the tech world could be an early signal – a harbinger of what many other industries will soon feel.
Robbins, the executive coach, says companies once looked to Silicon Valley as a model for operating, going so far as to imitate policies like unlimited vacation days or adopt perks like free lunch in the office.
“The business world has long romanticized technology and Silicon Valley. Some of that has changed,” he says. “Now people don’t ask me to tell them what’s happening in the Valley so they can embrace it, like they did ten years ago.”
Rather than a model for how we should all work, the tech industry could be a preview of the anxiety and attempts to compensate that await us all.