The old SF tech scene is dead. What it's morphing into is more sinister
81 comments
·September 16, 2025iamleppert
looseyesterday
I am sad to hear about your exp. and I think I understand where you're coming from but is the same also not true of most other jobs? I think the big advantage of a 'screen job' is less pressure on your body, alot of plumbers for example end up with bad knees and back issues.
david_allison
> I got into tech because I wanted to help make the world better, not worse. I can confidentially say after working in the industry for over 20 years, that it doesn't do that. That's not what it is. It's not what it's ever been about.
I can confidently say that it does. Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of everything is crap, but there are pockets of good, and they make all the difference.
ProllyInfamous
What do you think of Price's Law, which suggests that the squareroot of people in most organizations perform half the work (e.g. 3 of 9 ; 10 of 100 ; 50 of 2500)? Put less-specifically, is the majority primarily net-neutral/-negative, productivity-wise?
From my IBEW recollections, this was probably true for our membership.
>there are pockets of good, and they make all the difference
Most-definitely. It took me my first four decades to realize this, but having spent the majority of my adult life blue collar, I certainly empathize with burning out (better than e.g. my lawyer/tech brothers "just lazy"). We cannot all be on good teams, it's statistically impossible, but surely more of oughtta.
throwup238
> What do you think of Price's Law, which suggests that the squareroot of people in most organizations perform half the work (e.g. 3 of 9 ; 10 of 100 ; 50 of 2500)? Put less-specifically, is the majority primarily net-neutral/-negative, productivity-wise?
The way I think about it is kind of like security: 99.99% of the time security guards are just standing around not doing anything or patrolling. They’re still needed even though they technically don’t do anything because there’s no way to predict when and where a breach will occur.
Likewise with productivity. Sure half the work might be done by a small minority but you can’t grow or sustain a business by trying to predict who those people are, especially as that minority changes over its lifecycle. Nor can you reliably predict which support roles are actually keystone roles without which the productive people are useless.
api
This perception is more a result of humans' powerful negativity bias. Negative news and views get orders of magnitude more engagement and propagation than positive ones.
When someone uses the Internet to do something positive, like learn something or make something or contact an old friend, they typically don't say a thing. Nobody talks about this. Everyone talks about all the negative uses. They capture our attention better.
This bias is something that's probably been selected for through humanity's evolutionary history. There's a saying: "if you mistake a bush for a lion, you're fine, but if you mistake a lion for a bush you're dead." You are the descendent of paranoid people who made the first mistake, not the second. Being hypervigilant about dangers is going to be adaptive on average in most environments.
UncleMeat
I'm leaving. For many years I believed that working in a generally positive corner of one of the megacorps would enable me to make the world a better place by contributing positively through work and generating a huge amount of income that I could donate to charity.
But the feeling of the entire industry being anti-humanity is growing too strong.
IshKebab
> and for what
A ton of money? Easy to forget about that if you don't have to worry about where next month's rent is coming from.
> I can confidentially say after working in the industry for over 20 years, that it doesn't do that.
I can confidently say that it has made the world better. You've just forgotten about all the things that sucked. Remember how we used to have to get taxis?
CodingJeebus
> Remember how we used to have to get taxis?
I remember that taxi drivers used to make a semblance of an income back in the day, but working in the gig economy now is essentially modern day digital serfdom. I had a buddy who got into Uber driving before the pandemic, got involved in some of the Uber social media communities in our area, and wound up knowing so many people who committed suicide because they were given auto loans by Uber to buy a car they'd never be able to pay back on Uber rides.
Not everyone benefits from this tech-driven world.
savorypiano
So many? Why not just let the car get repo'd? Sounds hyperbolic.
zeroxfe
> Not everyone benefits from this tech-driven world.
Nobody is claiming that.
codyb
That sucks.
I'm happy I moved away from advertising/other tech shit I don't agree with and found a position at a company whose work I respect.
I really enjoy mentoring the younger engineers. And because all tech basically looks the same to me at this point (I.E. it's very rare I encounter a new pattern after 15 years of startups, personal projects, and big cos, and freelance) I spend a ton less time focused on learning and more time focused on creating opportunities for others.
I'm also really thankful to have a mostly remote work style, opportunities to volunteer through work (and other events like game nights, happy hours), and a product people know and like.
It is of course not all roses and sweet teas. Promotions are scarce, the stock's volatile, sometimes people can suck to work with, and the organization can be hard to work in due to complexity and coordination challenges. But that's okay, can't have it all I suppose.
If I felt like you do... I'd... do something else I think, or look for a new gig. (Easier said than done I know). Hope you find some peace friend
Small idea: Have you looked outside of the Tech industry towards other areas where companies need tech workers?
the_biot
For me, the answer was always open source. Tech is endlessly interesting, and I love programming, but it's usually wasted in a corporate environment.
everdrive
>Eventually as you get older, your "passion" for learning new things just for the sake of learning wanes
Crucially, you're not really even learning anything that matters. You're just learning new UIs, a new query language, a new framework, etc, and all are equally meaningless; they aren't applicable to other parts of your life, and aren't necessarily even applicable to your job a few years from now.
fitnessrunner
As a 42-year old who has been at this 20 years or so... and who got into tech back in the early 2000s for the love of computer science, I keep thinking to myself... maybe I could become a:
* Physical therapist (5+ years of training)
* Nurse (5+ years of training)
* Pharmacist (Out of the picture at this point)
* Plumber (5+ years of training (to actually get to a point
* where I would be pulling in good money))
* Electrician (same)
* Carpenter (same)
Or... continue to languish here. It really sucks right now. I've been doing 9x9x6 for the past several months because my company fired most of the US staff and are left with a skeleton contingent picking up the pieces, and of course now everything is on fire and everything is an emergency. Lunch meetings, 7AM, 9PM, weekend meetings aren't even blinked at in terms of being abnormal.
I can't stand AI and what it has "done" for society.
:-(
jerf
The best time to search for a new job is when you have one. Takes a lot of the stress out of search itself, though it sounds like your current job may be able to make it up.
There's a lot of companies out there. Many of them are doing useful things. I've worked in security for a long time; not as a "security expert" but for a company doing that. While I'd rather live in a world where we didn't need security companies, and it sucks that it's a problem, it's also something I know is actually contributing to the world, even if that contribution is solving problems that shouldn't exist. There are other companies doing useful things.
It may take a while to find something better but it'll take less time if you're looking than if you aren't.
fidotron
Whatever tech scene SF may have had died with the dotcom 1.0 collapse. What has existed since then is various forms of ad and surveillance web apps masquerading as something more interesting.
Actual SV always was and remains much more interesting, though perhaps less so than the 90s heyday. The fact the associated vibe difference is so perfectly demonstrated by the state of their airports is quite brilliant.
oersted
I’ve had three long trips to the Bay area a in the last couple of years. It’s so interesting to hear locals talking about SF and SV as different worlds and making such a big deal about driving over.
They are less than an hour apart (roughly) and it’s all a connected continuum. It’s trivial to move between them several times a day for different appointments. I thought people were much more used to long drives than in EU, I suppose it varies by region.
thomassmith65
It wasn't the dot-com bubble popping in 2000. It was the 'AppStore gold rush': July 10, 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)
splap
dotcom was more SV than SF
jandrewrogers
The dotcom boom happened in Silicon Valley, not San Francisco. All of the action was in the Santa Clara valley. Things moved toward San Francisco during the social media boom that happened many years later.
quesera
SF city was very active with software/web/media startups in dotcom 1.0.
cratermoon
At some point, after the dot-com collapse but around the time of the Facebook IPO, SF (and SV) started to attract people who cared more about the money than the tech itself. Creating a software product was seen not as a goal in itself, but as a means to make money. The actual thing, SaaS, social network, shopping, trading, whatever, didn't matter. All that mattered was that it could make money, the more the better.
Of course for now the AI companies are bleeding money, as it costs more per user than they charge, but that will change as soon as they accomplish the necessary lock-in.
cheriot
SF's culture war against tech is so tiring.
The AI boom replaced the SaaS/Gig boom. We no longer have a dozen large caps in hyper growth at the same time and market conditions are less profligate so the hiring market is different https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mm40
Gig work was yesterday's punching bag, but I guess we're nostalgic for it now.
> Overall, it feels like we’ve drifted past a point of no return
Every day.
JCM9
I do agree SF and the Bay Area have lost their allure and there are now much better places to live with opportunity and culture in tech. I don’t fully agree with the AI focus of the article. Yes it’s a bubble and the billboards are depressing, but comical if you view in the context of companies trying to out grift each other for your $$. However it wasn’t that long ago that the same billboards were saying everything would be on the blockchain now and that didn’t turn out so well.
I’d say the main sad thing is once the Bay Area was taken over by VC bros in fleece vests and mega corps it lost its soul. In some ways the place became the thing it started out fighting against, and so have many of its companies. Eg Salesforce started as the rebel solution to big bloated clunky tech, and now Salesforce is the big bloated clunky tech that a new generation groans at using.
SF turning into an almost literal dumpster fire hasn’t helped as any good “hub” also needs a clear downtown, and most folks actively avoid going into SF these days.
looseyesterday
I think like most things the internet 'ate' SF now you can work remote and most importantly start new companies remotely. OFC scale, capital and in-person still matter, but Australia, UK, Germany, Spain, all now have significant tech hubs, with VC scale capital, decent talent pipelines and same access as everyone else. Its only a matter of time over the next few cycles as more and more future 'big tech' comes from elsewhere in the world.
ExpertAdvisor01
Hard disagree . They might be good as incubators, but no one comes close to the us in terms of scaling and access to capital.
TheOtherHobbes
"Access to capital" meaning "Forced to work on MBA-infected bullshit because that's all that gets funded."
I suspect the answer is a bootstrap economy - small businesses that are actually small, growing sustainably but not trying to be unicorns, freezing out the VC clown show as a matter of policy.
It's not as if there aren't plenty of pain points that could do with fixing outside of web/social marketing and corporate colonisation.
debatem1
I think there's something to what the author says about the shift from mission-driven startups to naked greed, but I don't think I would have put it that way.
Over the last two decades the startup scene has gone from trying to improve nearly everybody's lives at very low cost to consumers (ad-supported services like maps and email) to trying to improve the lives of the upper middle class with debatable impacts on everyone else (gig economy stuff) to something whose most obvious application is destroying jobs (ai).
That's a pretty quick shift from utopian to dystopian rhetoric, and people who bought the line are right to find that jarring.
thwarted
The tech scene in SF and the Bay Area at large was taking its last breath in 2015. When I arrived in SF in 2007, it was, in retrospect, already on its way out. But you could still walk down Mission in SOMA and overhear people talking about Apache configuration, witness technical team meetings in Yerba Buena Gardens, or run into the same people from another company's engineering team at the rotating schedule of bespoke coffee places (if the online camera someone setup across the alley from Blue Bottle indicated it was to busy, Special Xtra was the closer alternative). In 2015, South Park was waning as a startup office Mecca. Overhearing technical discussions and interviews at coffee shops and bars was replaced with overhearing discussions about pitch decks and VC meetings.
By 2015, the industry was fully infected with finance bros drawn to "easy VC money". This when we got non-viable startups like juicero, flower delivery, or one that would pick up your mail and scan it. Companies like WeWork and Uber being tech companies because they have an "app" made everyone think all you needed was an app to be a tech company, and having an app was defacto required to get VC investment.
The trends have always been evident from the billboards you'd see in the city and along 101. They have become more homogeneous with AI content more recently, but the blockchain/Bitcoin cycle was pretty homogeneous too.
I don't know that's there more far-right. But there is less of the free-spirit hippy branding (which was riding on 60s and 70s nostalgia anyway). Mention going to Burning Man and people say "Really?" rather than "Cool". The people who got rich over a decade ago got older.
The advertising/billboards do reflect/are the zeitgeist. There are conversations about working at an AI startup or how their pitch is based on AI at the coffee shop I frequent, which is outside SOMA/FiDi (and in view of the GGB). I don't think it's more sinister, SF still feels like California, at least in terms of the coastal relaxed attitude and hope if not in terms of being a big tech draw. Thanks to COVID, coming to the Bay Area to work in tech isn't required, or expected, anymore, which makes all the narrowly focused billboards seem odd: who are they advertising to other than other AI startups?
softwaredoug
We might be nostalgically forgetting the dystopian things setup during the 2010s. Social media in its modern form comes out of the 2010s. Feed-based engagement meant to keep you clicking and angry. Not to mention the modern corporate surveillance regime we just accept now. These companies knew it then, but ignore evidence of the harm done.
guywithahat
This author seems to have trouble distinguishing between things she doesn't like and far-right. I don't think downtown SF is "exalt" with far-right inhabitants, and given the largest AI firms are run by a gay man, climate man, and a company who build their brand on left-wing "alignment" I don't think the industry is "exalt" among the right either.
andy99
Yeah I let that go, it seems to be following Orwell's "fascist means anything we don't like" observation. Otherwise I think there is some grain of truth to the high level observations in article, even if the treatment is pretty shallow.
grammarpolice17
That's not how the word exalt works, even if you put it in scare quotes.
lenerdenator
The current far-right is ultimately Social Darwinism repackaged into a hoodie with an ironic vibe.
These people ultimately see themselves as the elite and those who have misgivings about their work as "less than". To oppose things like mass tech surveillance and mass unemployment through AI isn't just a thing born out of concerns held by many people, it's a literal attack on the order of nature. If your concerns were worth anything, you'd be sharing it with them at an esoteric corporate-backed technology foundation retreat or at a Mar-a-Lago lunch, but you're not.
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treyd
It's possible to be gay and be far-right. Most people have some internal conflicts in their personal political positions, if they even think it through that far.
If you're a billionaire, your class interest in protecting capital usually overrides social interests and alliances.
eltondegeneres
> It's possible to be gay and be far-right
It's not uncommon either. Ernst Röhm comes to mind, but there are plenty of contemporary examples too.
throwirirmr
How about being trans? Left does not respect bodily autonomy, and demands everyone removes their genitals! For left I am just piece of meat, that must serve their political interests!!!
But consensual vaginal piercing is genital mutilation!
Left has internal conflict where they hate "classes" they are "protecting"!!!
softwaredoug
It was useful during a talent crunch for CEOs to signal they are left-leaning. In reality their left-leaning stance was just as performative as any cozying-up to Trump, etc.
stego-tech
Literally this. There is no leftist billionaire tech CEO because you cannot both be a billionaire and also have leftist ideals. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
softwaredoug
Well you might be a billionaire and support some regulations to squash smaller companies. You can deal with them because you are big, they are small and will not be able to move as fast under the new regulatory regime.
OccamsMirror
In America, neoliberalism with classical social liberalism is considered to be “left wing”. We are so embedded in capitalism in the Western world we have forgotten what actually leftist ideals are.
ThrowawayR2
Arguably one can't be a leftist when making SF tech salaries either. A casual check of an L5 at Google (as a representative example; they do have an office in SF) says their total comp. is about $413k, putting them in the labor aristocracy or at least in the "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" type of leftist.
aeternum
Consider that they could have changed their mind given the increased rhetoric against billionaires and ceos, blocked m&a, and attempted use of the judicial rather than legislature to make rules for companies. (I did)
Molitor5901
To me it felt a little more about being left behind. I felt this undercurrent of bitterness that the city the author once exalted, through the tech boom, the tech bro era, is leaving her behind, and in its place are the natural progressions of that era she whims nostalgically about.
Like the factory towns of the pre-digital era, when it's good it's great, but when they leave, innovate away, or move on it can leave those behind feeling cheated.
kerpal
Author makes some good points though, I think many of us are feeling a bit of AI fatigue. There's so many platforms and services available now, and a large group will likely be vaporware soon as the market battle plays out.
I'll admit these "far right" labels don't hold much weight, usually just a way to expose yourself (the author here). But I agree with much of the overall sentiment of the article. The AI hype feels a bit dystopian and I say that as someone who has been heavily using LLMs since 2023.
They're very useful but we also have to ask ourselves what the world will look like if we automate everyone out of a job.
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0xbadcafebee
The SF 'tech scene' was already a joke in 2014, when a TV show satirized it for six seasons. The city used to be known for art, counter-culture, free expression. It turned into tech bros telling themselves they were 'saving the world' only to get rich off of bloated salaries, "exiting" web and mobile apps, cryptocurrency. The gentrification, stupidly expensive real estate/rent/restaurants, crime, and homelessness, were the warts on the pimpled ass of a city run over by 'tech people'. And the endless supply of free money from VCs made sure that the stream of shit never ran dry.
But now you're bothered? After 25 years of abuse that city has put up with, and all the evil it's pushed on the world, AI ads are your breaking point?
bix6
Money is a sickness and it’s got a stranglehold on the bay.
SilverbeardUnix
It's always been like that at the top but starry eyed nerds were able to delude themselves into believing that it wasn't so. Now the veil is gone and people see how evil it really is and don't care because the money is right. Although I can't blame people, I made my money all the same.
It makes me sick when I think how I have wasted my life in tech. If I had it to do over again, I would have done almost anything else. Spending most of your life rotting in front of a screen, knowing what you are doing is only helpful to a small group of people who don't care about you and you will never meet or know, ephemeral, and for what? Eventually as you get older, your "passion" for learning new things just for the sake of learning wanes and you start to see tech for it really is, and all new tech starts to look the same. If you're around long enough you'll be burned and screwed by the aggressive personalities the industry attracts.
I got into tech because I wanted to help make the world better, not worse. I can confidentially say after working in the industry for over 20 years, that it doesn't do that. That's not what it is. It's not what it's ever been about.
Almost everyone I know in tech is not happy, and works non-stop, expected to give their all for a company that could fire them tomorrow for no reason. They have been doing this for years. If anything good comes from AI, maybe it will be a release? A release from the hell of being chained to a laptop screen for most of our lives?