Not lengthy after the phrases “996” and “grindcore” entered the widespread lexicon, folks began telling me tales about what was occurring at startups in San Francisco, floor zero for the artificial intelligence financial system. There was the one about the founder who hadn’t taken a weekend off in additional than six months. The lady who joked that she’d given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI firm. Or the staff who had began taking their sneakers off in the workplace as a result of, effectively, should you had been going to be there for no less than 12 hours a day, six days every week, wouldn’t you somewhat be wearing slippers?
“For those who go to a restaurant on a Sunday, everybody is working,” says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be nearer to the motion. Lokuhitige says he works seven days every week, 12 hours a day, minus a number of fastidiously chosen social occasions every week the place he can community with different folks at startups. “Generally I’m coding the entire day,” he says. “I do not have work-life steadiness.”
One other startup worker, who got here to San Francisco to work for an early-stage AI firm, confirmed me dismal images from his workplace: a two-bedroom condominium in the Dogpatch, a neighborhood popular with tech workers. His startup’s founders stay and work on this condominium – from 9am till as late as 3am, breaking solely to DoorDash meals or to sleep, and leaving the constructing solely to take cigarette breaks. The worker (who requested not to use his title, since he nonetheless works for this firm) described the scenario as “horrendous”. “I’d heard about 996, however these guys don’t even do 996,” he says. “They’re working 16-hour days.”
Startups have by no means been notably glamorous. Once I began reporting on the trade a decade in the past, folks had been cashing in on the new cellular app financial system, and coders were chugging Soylent to keep at their desks longer. Startups then, too, had been outlined by hustle culture, high-octane energy and the pursuit of growth at all costs – concepts that, to some extent, have remained in the bloodstream of the trade.
However in the final 12 months, as the magic mud of synthetic intelligence has settled in San Francisco, the vibe amongst tech employees does appear completely different. The thrill a couple of new epoch in tech – and all the cash that comes with it – is now tempered with anxieties about the trade, and the financial system. Some employees are going all in on AI whereas additionally questioning whether or not all that AI is good for the world. Others are successfully coaching machines to do their jobs higher than they will. And plenty of of the similar employees who are racing to construct the future are now questioning if the future they’re constructing has a spot for them in it.
The remainder of us could also be ambiently conscious of those anxieties, however they are already tangible and keenly felt inside the tech trade. Even the greatest tech corporations, as soon as identified for coddling staff with on-site massages and barber outlets, have scaled back perks as they’ve escalated the expectations of employees. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have every been candid about their predictions that AI will change some junior and mid-level engineers at their corporations, and have respectively referred to as for his or her workforces to be extra “environment friendly” and “extremely hard core” as waves of layoffs set staff on-edge. Tech corporations laid off a couple of quarter of one million employees round the world in 2025, in accordance to a report printed by RationalFX. In lots of these layoffs, AI was cited as a main factor, even when the full purpose for layoffs is typically extra advanced.
“For those who had been a software program engineer 5 years in the past, you may form of write your ticket,” says Mike Robbins, an govt coach who has labored with corporations like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Airbnb. Now, the steadiness of energy has shifted away from tech employees, lots of whom are left feeling anxious about their work efficiency. “When corporations develop into much less scared about dropping staff, then they could be a little extra forthright when it comes to what they need and be just a little extra demanding.”
Robbins, who wrote the ebook Convey Your Complete Self to Work, used to be requested to communicate to corporations and their leaders about matters like worker burnout, wellbeing and belonging – high priorities in the years throughout and shortly after the pandemic. “Fairly frankly, we’ve stopped speaking about all that,” he says. Now, firm leaders need recommendation on matters like change, disruption and uncertainty in the office.
These themes – change, disruption and uncertainty – are every a part of the gas that has pushed tech employees to put in additional hours, at a better depth. Funding in synthetic intelligence corporations reached record highs in 2025, but employees are feeling shortage in methods they haven’t before.
“It’s undoubtedly one thing that’s on everybody’s thoughts,” says Kyle Finken, a software program engineer at Mintlify, which makes an AI device for builders. “I believe lots of people are involved like, ‘Oh, am I going to have a job in three years?’”
Regardless of his fears, Finken, like many different startup staff I spoke to, feels energized by the “extraordinary innovation” occurring in synthetic intelligence and believes that there’ll nonetheless be loads of jobs for software program engineers in the future, even when these jobs look completely different from the pure coding roles of as we speak. He and different tech employees characterised the present second as a very inventive and productive time in tech, the place folks are devoting additional hours to work not as a result of their employers demand it however out of real curiosity in the new instruments and capabilities. For instance, Garry Tan, the head of the well-known startup accelerator Y Combinator, not too long ago bragged that he “stayed up 19 hours” taking part in round with Claude Code.
Even those that felt enthusiastic about the tempo of change acknowledged that AI was quickly augmenting their work, in ways in which might have unsure outcomes for the jobs of the future. “This is undoubtedly not an period of complacency,” says Finken.
One purpose for working so many hours is to sustain with instruments and know-how that are altering practically day-after-day. For those who take the weekend off, you possibly can miss a significant improvement, which makes it more durable to sustain with what opponents are doing. One more reason is to have one thing to present future employers, particularly as extra junior-level jobs are changed by AI.
“Nobody hires junior builders any extra,” says Lokuhitige, the Mythril co-founder. Touchdown a job now requires “doing one thing cool”, he says, like constructing a brand new product or fixing an issue that will get acknowledged as helpful by bigger corporations. Job postings for entry-level tech jobs have dropped by a 3rd since 2022, in accordance to Indeed’s Hiring Lab, whereas job postings requiring no less than 5 years of expertise have risen. For those who’re not grinding at a startup, you’re lacking the prerequisite to get employed in the future.
What this implies for the remainder of us
Whereas economists are torn about whether or not AI will change most jobs or simply change them, they appear aligned in the concept that AI has already reshaped quite a lot of entry-level work and can proceed to achieve this. A paper printed by Stanford researchers in November discovered “substantial declines in employment for early-career employees” in industries uncovered to AI and urged that areas the place change is already occurring may very well be like a “canary in the coalmine” for the remainder of the financial system. The Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, has urged AI might eradicate about half of all entry-level jobs in white-collar industries inside the subsequent 5 years.
The pinnacle of the Worldwide Financial Fund not too long ago predicted that 60% of jobs in superior economies can be eradicated or remodeled by synthetic intelligence, “like a tsunami hitting the labour market”. In San Francisco, you possibly can already see the early indicators, as Uber drivers compete with self-driving Waymos, and baristas are changed by robotic espresso bars. Skilled enterprise companies that assist the tech trade have additionally been negatively affected by the layoffs. The stress to grind in the tech world may very well be an early sign – a harbinger for what many different industries will really feel quickly.
Robbins, the govt coach, says that corporations as soon as appeared to Silicon Valley as a mannequin of how they need to function, down to emulating insurance policies like limitless trip days or adopting perks like free lunch in the workplace.
“There was an idealization of tech and Silicon Valley for a very long time throughout the enterprise world. A few of that has modified,” he says. “Now, folks aren’t asking me to inform them what’s going on in the Valley in order that they will undertake it, the similar approach they had been a decade in the past.”
Moderately than a mannequin of how we should always all work, the tech trade could also be a premonition for the nervousness and makes an attempt to compensate that are coming for all of us.
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