Our Data Shows San Francisco Tech Workers Are Working Saturdays

Ten years ago, I used to work Saturdays, but mostly out of enjoyment. This is a fun profession!

when your credit card is telling people where and when you work it is time to reconsider your credit card

20% more effective employees thanks to AI

The y axis only goes up to 0.4%

edit: see azundos explanation

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.

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.

I'll take propaganda trying to normalize the idea of 996 for 200, Alex.

Good luck to them when they burn out.

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.

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.

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.

Remember, if you're allowed to discuss sports or video games at work, you're also allowed to discuss unionizing at work.

This applies to Slack channels and such, if there's a Dungeons and Dragons channel on the company Slack, you can also make a channel about unionizing.

This is the law (NLRA).

saturday is the best day of the week for me to actually get work done becuase nobody is going to interrupt me

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.

More specifically:

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.

This is the type of data analysis I would not want to have done on employees and companies data.

Sure, let's normalize this, think of the shareholders...

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.

> It’s more than just tech. The Saturday increase shows up across sectors among SF-based companies on Ramp, not only software

Headline: SF tech workers are working Saturdays

> All data is available for download from Ramp Economics Lab.

It's not, though?

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.

Any article written in 2025 citing "Twitter" as a data source (in the first paragraph) is suspect.

This is "hustle" seen through the eyes of an "economist".

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."

just wait until they realize that we're also working on sundays

996 is bullshit, what slacker doesn’t start work until 9? It should be 666

Related:

New trend: extreme hours at AI startups

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156674

996

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049

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.