The Old SF Tech Scene Is Dead. What It's Morphing Into Is More Sinister
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
sfgate.comTechstoryHigh profile
heatednegative
Debate
85/100
San Francisco Tech SceneAI IndustryTech Culture
Key topics
San Francisco Tech Scene
AI Industry
Tech Culture
The article laments the decline of the old SF tech scene and criticizes the current AI-focused industry for being 'sinister', sparking a heated discussion among commenters about the industry's impact and values.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
34m
Peak period
76
0-3h
Avg / period
12.3
Comment distribution111 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 111 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 16, 2025 at 11:00 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 16, 2025 at 11:34 AM EDT
34m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
76 comments in 0-3h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 18, 2025 at 3:03 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45263230Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 3:47:06 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
If you're a billionaire, your class interest in protecting capital usually overrides social interests and alliances.
It's not uncommon either. Ernst Röhm comes to mind, but there are plenty of contemporary examples too.
There are good leftists who do big tech work (the main detraction of the HN crowd who don’t want to feel guilty over their salaries), it’s just that none of the ones I know are active in cesspools like these. They’re too busy living in a modest home and spending their excesses on people’s rent, bills, necessities, and generally uplifting others since they no longer need anything themselves. My interaction with the HN crowd is that most would balk at the idea of using their funds to support others’ fundamental necessities, and yet that is far more leftist than anything any SV profiteer has previously pushed for.
The fact that articles like the one submitted are increasing should alert you that the working poor do not see overpaid techbros as on their side, no matter how much they claim they are.
What I can’t square is why they (probably correctly) don’t see overpaid techbros as on their side, but they do see their bosses, and others even more alienated from their lives and struggles as in their side.
As an aside, I had friends who had to declare bankruptcy during DotCom 1.0 because of stock options and the Alternative Minimum Tax. This could have been fixed with legislation but it always seemed like the DC inside-the-beltway crowd saw the whole thing as class treachery and refused to intervene.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exalt
I'd say that anyone who cavorts with the likes of Thiel and Yarvin are under the far-right umbrella. And a huge number of SV elites are more than happy to sit at the same table, quite literally.
I have so, so many more citations. Agreeing with Miller that leftism should be forcefully eradicated. Calling people on benefits parasites. Modifying Grok when it spits out un-MAGA facts that offend him. Blaming trans people for mass violence.
(And people who know him say the climate thing was nothing more than PR to begin with.)
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.
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.
No, it’s just the most versatile medium of economic exchange that we have. The sickness is not having the word “enough” in your vocabulary.
San Francisco has been such a concentration point and crossroads since the Gold Rush era. It had a frontier spirit, but also became a west coast center of finance and logistics. It has always been an arena for this tension between opportunism and idealism.
Don't think that has being the case when the rent start to compete with NYC. It is a shame, but that is how gentrification has ruined another city.
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.
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.
Absolutly. I used to work in SF. My startup is remote and we operate in europe. slack + regular meetups is all we need.
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.
Edit to add: for those in denial, SF was HQ for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com
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.
You mean to tell me there are companies where creating software by itself is not frowned upon?!
Where do I apply?
(Caveat: I'm thinking of the 1997-2000 period. Netscape IPOed in mid 1995, the bust was early 2000, so that covers the last 2/3rds of the first wave, but not all of it.)
My observations at the time: dotcom-1.0 was split pretty evenly between SF and SV, but there were clear differences in focus. Hardware and legacy stuff was all in SV, software/web/media was substantially all in SF.
Dotcom-2.0 (social media/SaaS/etc) was entirely in SF.
I'd agree that SF owned 2.0 and shared 1.0, but 1.0 in the city was extremely busy with founders, employees, launches, leases, and money.
I worked up and down the peninsula. Investors and data centers (VCs and DCs) were down south -- the latter with one exception: 200 Paul Ave, although itself at the extreme southern edge of SF.
Founders, staff, offices, and everything else were in the city.
I worked at one company who opened an office in the valley, but we literally couldn't hire people down there (Santa Clara), and couldn't get people to move there. All the action was in SF, for a software/web/media business.
There was nothing of note up in SF in those days. SF was the place to go up to party, but no known companies existed there. Everyone I knew who lived in SF would commute down to Silicon Valley in the 90s.
After the dotcom bust, when tech morphed away from actual tech and into social media, SF became a hotspot. But that was several years later after the crash.
NSCP, SUNW, and CSCO did not in any way define dotcom-1.0. Except maybe in the national press (Fortune, WSJ, etc). They were important parts, but not particularly special on any axis: money, employees, technology, cachet.
NSCP IPO was a defining moment, but the corporation was ultimately nothing in the boom. CSCO and SUNW were not even startups, they just produced higher volumes of their (mostly) existing product lines.
Obviously we're coming from different frames of reference, but I stick to my assertion. SF city was crawling with startups, startup money, and startup employees. So was SV.
All the hype and money and "cachet" was in Silicon Valley during dot.com boom.
Having been deeply embedded in that era of Silicon Valley, I can't think of a single recognizable tech company in SF in those days. Later, absolutely. But not in the late 90s boom.
Netscape IPO kicked it off and Sun and Cisco took it to the heights now known as the dot.com boom.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Do you know that it's the existence of taxi laws that make it largely illegal for, after a concert or other large event lets out, it's illegal for Uber to just have a line of cars and for people to line up and just get into the next available car? So instead the parking lot right after is this ridiculous madhouse of everyone waiting around for "their" car.
Taxis did themselves in. Somehow, they've still not managed to catch up. Just a month ago I was in Vegas and got ripped off by a taxi. Took Uber/Lyft the rest of my time there.
Nobody is claiming that.
I wouldn’t use that as an example of how tech has made the world better.
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.
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.
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.
Security guards, like system administrators who keep the lights on and don't directly contribute to revenue, are insurance, something you pay for that you hope you never have to use. Those who don't see the value are taking risk management seriously.
> Those who don't see the value are not taking risk management seriously.
>99.99% of the time [we were] just standing around not doing anything
So much time I voluntarily spent sorting parts / carts, in preparation for the few hours each week we were actually needed — most just dove into their phones, idly — and even I wouldn't have considered myself in that over-productive squareroot. Everything was dual-feed power, so most of the year was spent unrushed.
But those few times of year where managed-risk pushed its limits... were certainly all hands on deck experiences.
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.
noname123 on March 27, 2016 | parent | context | un‑favorite | on: My year in startup hell
>It's brilliant, I'd never want to work for a corporate company! We have regular parties, play table tennis daily, beers on Friday. It just makes work so much more enjoyable.
When you leave or a bunch of your friends who used to go to happy hour together leave "for better opportunities," you'll realize that most people who are your work drinking buddies didn't really know you or felt or thought deeply about your personal experiences. (It's not that they're bad people, it's just what happens when people are put in an artificial social environment where people slap high-fives after work rec dogeball and shout out witty one-liners).
Also when you realize after 5 or 6 years of working, and the startup mantra of "changing the world," your other friends whom you laughed at before, toiling away in their fields have started coming on their own. You have only pushed bits for marketing, spam, online shopping, on-demand on-gig economy for people like yourself to get a stick of gum delivered in an hour. You can try to justify how you are promoted from junior all the way to lead to technical product manager, or how you led your team to switch from Rails to Node, SQL to Cassandra, Java to Scala. But you'll begin to see the thin-veneer of how little management cares about tech and how most of it is a pep-rally, a race to the bottom for those at the top of the Ponzi scheme to enrich themselves.
You look at other people in other fields or in other area's of tech. At work cafeteria IKEA lunch table (after a lengthy morning standup where there was yet another pissing match about React vs. Angular), People shoot the breeze about AlphaGo or that Tay twitter bot, and someone else shoot another witty one-liner comeback, everyone laughs, one person groans - in between the silence after the reactions settle in, it dawns slowly on your mind that we've all become spectators in the real information technology revolution.
That what you are toiling away when you go back to your desk after this lunch conversation is just another Twitter stream, another HN comment, Instagram heart, albeit decorated in syntax highlighting to the "AWS/Google Cloud/Azure Twitterverse."
That is just the same as the well-dressed girl or guy sitting in the next row over in the open-office environment, whom you never talk to but to make yourself feel better, secretly put down in your mind because what they do "is so much BS, social media customer engagement"; but they are the same, and you're all the same...
You call your friends up from college and hear their stories at the precarious precipice of 28-30. How many hours they stayed up at the hospital during a rotation, and a critical debate they had with their attending whether to admit a patient; or how many e-mails they had to sent to get their 15 minute film considered at 50 different film festivals; or staying on after getting finally their PhD, to work for free to do the technology transfer to industry the physics research they worked on in their group; and always, the one-liner remark, "tech has it so much better, you guys make so much money!"
Of course, the response begets a begrudging smile or another sequitur to equalize the conversation; but come work Monday, the habit to don on the noise canceling headphones, the cursory checks on social media to keep abreast fantasy football leagues/stock portfolio's, the internal monologue of the recalculation how much your employee stock options are going to be worth/vest, have all become instinctive rituals to not let the existential dread set in.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370776
We software devs get a fun job that pays enough that we don't have to worry about money at all. If you want to feel like you're making the world a better place, take the 50% paycut and go into the nonprofit sector. They need software devs, too.
* 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.
:-(
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.
Your job may or may not be pointless but it probably provided a very nice quality of life for you and your family.
Things are pretty dire for a lot of professions right now...
It’s not gonna be fun for my joints, but breaking my back on my own house will probably the most useful skill I will learn in my life than clicking my life away sat at a keyboard. After two decades, doing hard work that’s hidden behind a screen, and the only impact is a virtual number incremented once a month, I wish to do something — anything — that leaves a mark on the physical world.
Right now, in Canada, the average rent is like 70% of the average income. If you enter the workforce today, in a myriad of professions, it's looking like there is zero chance of ever owning a home if you're not at least 2 standard deviations above average.
I have been saving from less than a year of work; I previously ran through 10 years of savings taking a long break after burnout. The type of burnout that turns you off completely from a career path, to the point that carrying bricks sounds more fun.
After a decade I shuttered my own electrical contracting shop because I realized I didn't want to become large enough for full-time employees, but also didn't want to be 100% responsible for problem solving 24/7 (in addition to sales, billing/collection).
If I had to start over Apprenticeship Year One, I couldn't afford to anywhere in America... unless perhaps I were still young and/or lived with parents at under-market rates. In my three decades working, now feels like the worst time to be Bottom 80th%ile™.
And how many are libertarians, waxing poetic like billionaires about capitalism and business, and/or hate the idea of unions?
And now our power is waning and the chance of making things better for ourselves is disappearing. Software engineers are a special kind of dumb.
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?
Sadly, I struck out badly in the startup lottery. So I'm broke and can't afford to move to a farm or something like that. Wish I could do things differently now.
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.
But the feeling of the entire industry being anti-humanity is growing too strong.
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.
Butter them up and then cut them off, they’ll be too fat to do anything about it.
I was just at a talk where they had "AI experts" judge a startup pitch for an AI call center company. None of them could admit that the obvious business model (bill the client based on number of tokens / seconds) would make customer outcomes much worse (by incentivizing the bot to keep the customer on the phone as long as possible and even encourage them to call back). But they refused to admit, or even consider, that business models can be exploitative and full of perverse incentives. These are people at the head of efforts at big-name tech companies and they're too caught up in the dazzle.
They won't accept that they are the ones making an entire industry available to grifters by couching all their language in this hope-and-change idealism. Or maybe we're watching how otherwise well-intentioned people can become grifters when they aren't able to reflect on their goals and their actions.
New Lease / Application – questions or starting an application
Maintenance Request – routine repairs, appliance issues, etc.
Emergency Maintenance – urgent (water leak, lock-out, etc.)
Billing / Payment – rent, deposits, fees
Lease Renewal / Move-Out – renewals, move-out scheduling
General Inquiry – community info, pet policy, amenities
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?
If you're going by the billboards along 101, at least they're still tech oriented. The values/culture in the Bay Area has declined and yes, it's now full of finance-bros, but at least we still value things like education and building the future. It could be a lot worse: where I lived for a long time before moving to California, the billboards say things like "Don't Shake Your Baby" and "Jesus Loves, Sinners Burn In Hell" not to mention the confederate flags everywhere.
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?
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.
From where I'm sitting (SoMa for coming up on two years) the city is still relatively empty compared to past booms where apt. hunting involved bidding wars. But RTO pushes are clearly progressing, albeit slowly.
Personally I prefer it empty, billboards are easy enough to ignore.
They never did. Anyway what else would you expect regarding the ads? The marketing people are just trying to get attention in an agressive manner (and it's working). This angle wouldn't be necessary if the AI was actually worth a damn for the proposed use case and sold itself.
It's actually really funny to see the last gasps before another AI winter. There is a future for LLMs, but it's probably customer engagement chatbots. Beyond replacing customer service, but also other junk people usually ignore like marketing surveys and other feedback.
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.
Everything that exists now is just a product of what was. You don't have a bunch of people acting as religious fanatics with AI replacing God unless there was a real culture that was okay with that to begin with.
You are indeed "building the future" (mind as a simple cogwheel, for sure you are not the one calling the shots in terms of products) but unlike the industrial revolutions that happened through the centuries there is no quality of life advantage of being near the epicenter of it all.
Each and every product is rolled out globally and in zero time, so a person from the opposite side of the world say Bali gets to enjoy the same product in a far better environment as far as quality of life, cost of life etc, plus they didn't even have to build the thing at all! They just get to use it, best of both worlds.
And although they are not at the frontier of tech and human advancement I imagine they own their business and they get to call the shots on how the gym/bakery/scooter renting is run
The only localized things which are only availible in SV are the "autonomous vehicles" which as of now are absolutely the most blatant failure of tech industry in this century considering that they kill occupants on a daily basis.
I expect people who currently populate SV to either wise up and recognize they are in a mouse trap or simply make the leap into an even higher intellectual ego dimension of theoretical physics and mathematics which can be done from everywhere and either way at that point SV would just unravel