Saturday corporate card transactions for restaurant, delivery, and takeout by employees at San Francisco-based businesses are 0.4% more than last year.
Given that AI has made repeatedly pulling the lever on the world's biggest digital slot machine feel like building a valuable software business, is it really any wonder that a lot of the younger founders who are raising seed rounds are really just glorified tweakers? I was recently on the market for a new job, and within two months I talked with three different founders who, pre-AI, may well have been "employed" stripping bicycles for parts to sell for meth. But now, thanks to Claude and ChatGPT, these folks are now able to vibe up enough traction to raise a couple million bucks in a seed round.
The fact that most of these folks are going to fail doesn't especially bother me. After all, that was true for previous generations as well. What's different now is that a lot of these folks not only won't be coming away from these experiences having developed marketable skills, but many of them will have significant health problems that prevent them from doing so in the future.
I'm actually very bullish on the use of AI in software development overall. But when placed in the hands of folks who haven't yet had the time to develop hard skills, it both enables and incentivizes cutting corners to an alarming extent.
My problem is not that they're going to fail, or even that they aren't going to learn much from their failure. It's that they're going to take many people down with them.
Just to take today's example: there's a npmjs supply chain attack. Dependabot & co are going to issue alerts. Most vibe coders aren't going to know what it's about, or even care. Which means that some of the users of vibe coded apps are going to lose their life savings over this ignorance.
At this point, it's obvious and clear that you can outwork these 996 companies by simply requiring employees work 7 days a week in the office.
What is preventing one of these 996 companies from doing that and taking the lead in their respective AI niche? If they really believe that an additional day is their competitive edge, that seems like a really easy moat to overcome for a competitor, and by that logic why stop there? Wouldn't you want to maximize your chances of success by requiring your employees work 7 days in the office?
Just have your employees work a full 7 days in the office. I'm not joking either. Would some CEO who has adopted this practice care to explain why they don't just make things simple and require their employees to report to the office 7 days per week? It's simple and will only select for the most hardcore of the hardcore. I'm actually surprised someone hasn't tried this yet.
The chart title says "996 is taking over San Francisco" and the Y-axis shows that the difference between 2024 and 2025 transactions per hour on Saturday for food-related categories is 0.4%
This is what happens when some team sees "996" is trending and demands a blog post be made with any possible supporting data they can find.
What an oddball take on the data they showed. If Saturdays were being worked the same as weekdays, the chart would be exactly the same as weekdays. It clearly is vastly different, so their conclusion makes no damn sense whatsoever.
you can literally buy purchase data from Mastercard, AMEX, and Discover and use this data for retargeting and advanced targeting w ads and run them on Facebook and other platforms.
A dog food purchase? Owner likely has pets, serve em a pet ad, etc.
It's a little difficult to parse but this is hourly share of transactions. If transactions were evenly spread out over 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, each hour would get about 1.8% of transactions. So a 0.4% change in hourly share for a given hour is quite significant.
Places like this (hackernews) and Reddit are where concepts like 996 become normalized and picked up by everyone else, including unrelated industries. I think this is something that needs to be nipped in the bud ASAP and not given any time to fester because "startup founders need to work 996 to secure revenue" or whatever.
No sarcasm, no humor; 996 posts should be met with nothing but flat out ridicule and disgust. One's life isn't solely about work and this kind of behavior just makes everyone else's life worse in the long term because there's a chance for short term gain.
This article is attempting to make some kind of statement about 996 and "look, now it's here!"
But this is plainly ridiculous. The Bay Area has been full of high achievers the entire time I've lived here (since the 20th century). All the startups I worked at, people would work Saturdays. Not all the time, of course, but it was quite common.
The article talks about how they are controlling for the variation across time, and they’re reporting a new signal. So even if everyone was working Saturdays before, everyone is more working Saturdays now. (Edited typos.)
Of course we are! This year has been the most exciting (and fun!) of my career in the Bay. There is so much to do and so much going on. Things that were impossible a year ago suddenly feel imminent. Nobody is forcing (or really even asking) me to work on the weekends but if I have an interesting idea bouncing around in my brain I'm not going to wait to Monday to play around with it.
Funny seeing your user name. When I worked myself to get ultimately nowhere but money that spends so quickly, the first thing that went was my music creation time.
Having children later in life is much harder/different than having them younger. You don't get to go back.
Your children are only children for a very short time. You don't get to go back.
Not earlier commenter but their username is a reference to “ableton live” which is music production software. Not “able to live” which is just a one letter difference
I should caveat this by saying this is certainly not 9/9/6, yeesh. Weekdays are fuzzy but never 12 hour days. Do you count going to a meetup after hours as work? A dinner with a prospect? Early coffee with a coworker? Saturdays or Sundays are maybe two or three hours at the most.
I don't understand why young engineers would do 996/007 work schedules for just 5% equity that gets diluted as soon as new funding round or an acquisition comes around. Look at the recent acquisitions of AI coding tools these "deals" should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone grinding away for someone else's benefit rather than their own.
3. Gets you in the entrepreneurship game. Out of the big tech trap. My first startup did not do well but a ton of us ended up starting companies, entering VC, etc.
He was talking about the music industry, not tech, but this reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's quotation that the industry was "a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
I did a huge amount of travel at various times and never had qualms about checking email or doing some other tasks optionally on days off from time to time, but never considered myself to be "working" on weekends.
I've never checked an email on the weekend or in the evening in my nearly 20 years at this current employer, and have never had any qualms about enjoying my time off.
I check it on my own time, but for my own personal curiosity. “I wonder how that team’s dealing with such and such”, that sort of thing. And my job’s inherently on-call 24/7; if something goes badly, I’ll get notified even if I’m not the primary responder, but that’s so rare that I never consider that when making plans.
I’m perfectly content turning my phone off to go camping or whatever. I also don’t feel bad seeing what my coworkers are up to when I’m out of office.
A lot of people are very binary. Yes, I'd internally grumble a bit if a business trip cut into a weekend for travel. I'd also sometimes check email over a weekend or PTO and resolve something if I could quickly. But I certainly didn't go into the office over weekends (or, indeed, latterly at all). And I never took time off for a doctor's appointment or other personal matters taking less than a full day.
And, to your point, if I did take PTO for vacation, the degree to which I'd be contactable or not was never a factor.
I helped a colleague working on a POC for a customer over the weekend. Was fun! Normally I wouldn’t work over the weekend but I find mentoring and teaching colleagues to be rewarding.
The worst thing is when you get users on this very board with the superiority complex because they pulling 55 hours/week in Cali since more than a decade.
What are some downsides in the past 2 years that you have seen living in SF? Any reliable sources online (bloggers, social media account, etc) of what city life is like in SF?
It’s certainly not a cheap city, but IME expenses aren’t high proportional to tech salaries. (Side note: …which feeds the “techbros” criticism.) Yes, it costs more to live here than where we were in Nebraska. It also pays a much higher percent more than the average salaries there, so the number of hours I have to work to buy a thing is significantly less.
That aside, SF is a world city with an enormous amount of interesting and fun things to do. And if you get bored with that, it’s a short trip to see giant redwoods or hike through forests or climb mountains. There is a lot to see and do.
That’s within one block of the TL, so I’m not shocked. When you’re immediately adjacent to the worst neighborhood in SF, you’re going to see some bad-neighborhood stuff. It’s going to look a lot different than, say, Nob Hill or Noe Valley.
TL-affinity for these issues hasn't been an accurate description of SF for several years.
We're talking about downtown SF, that's it. Part of Civic Center was converted into a skate park to drive the homeless out because what used to be kept local-ish to the TL had spread throughout downtown.
On any given night you'll now find an open air market of stolen goods at the corner of Seventh and Market, across from Civic Center. Is that in the TL? The situation is more fluid than in the past, and these people are indeed still sleeping and shitting on the sidewalks.
I don't drink coffee, but I believe you. I'm sure there are still some areas that are bad. I just haven't seen it in the areas that I frequent (although I used to).
Silicon Valley has worked 996 as long as I can remember. Even during sprints at Google it was worse 24/7 was common at times.
I work with China and US tech scene and while the chinese scene is more 'hungry' these days US scene is just, if not even more, hardworking and certainly works 'smarter' quite often.
Saturday corporate card transactions for restaurant, delivery, and takeout by employees at San Francisco-based businesses are 0.4% more than last year.
Everything else in the article is guesswork.