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.
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.
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.
jandrewrogers 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
SF city was very active with software/web/media startups in dotcom 1.0.
cheriot 2 hours ago [-]
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.
debatem1 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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?
guywithahat 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
That's not how the word exalt works, even if you put it in scare quotes.
3 hours ago [-]
lenerdenator 3 hours ago [-]
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.
softwaredoug 3 hours ago [-]
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.
aeternum 3 hours ago [-]
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)
stego-tech 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ThrowawayR2 2 hours ago [-]
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.
garbawarb 2 hours ago [-]
Why shouldn't an employee at one of the world's most profitable companies be paid well? Should they work for less so that the company can profit more and they can somehow prove a point?
MontyCarloHall 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Arguably, a true Marxist would say that $413k/year is underpaid. The average profit-per-employee at Google is $1.95M/year, and the Marxist ideal of cooperative ownership prescribes that workers deserve a larger share of that than $413k.
peterbecich 42 minutes ago [-]
The total profit of Google would probably drop if the company was radically "re-organized" like that.
ThrowawayR2 1 hours ago [-]
The true Marxist would be trying to demolish Google and other tech companies and their unreasonably outsized profits as being unfair to workers as a class. But unsurprisingly, people are interpreting it in a way so that they can continue to rake in a gloriously fat paycheck and live a lavish lifestyle. In a peoples' revolution, they'd get what the kulaks got.
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.
softwaredoug 2 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
stego-tech 12 minutes ago [-]
This is the best comment of the bunch, I think. Judging by the vote tally and engagement on my original response, you’re spot-on that people are so Capitalism-drunk that they cannot see the broader ideological planes around them.
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.
treyd 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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"!!!
Molitor5901 3 hours ago [-]
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.
softwaredoug 3 hours ago [-]
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.
0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago [-]
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?
kerpal 3 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
JCM9 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cultofmetatron 2 minutes ago [-]
> I think like most things the internet 'ate' SF now you can work remote and most importantly start new companies remotely.
Absolutly. I used to work in SF. My startup is remote and we operate in europe. slack + regular meetups is all we need.
ExpertAdvisor01 2 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
"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.
bix6 3 hours ago [-]
Money is a sickness and it’s got a stranglehold on the bay.
iamleppert 2 hours ago [-]
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?
looseyesterday 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thwarted 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
I spent a couple years apprenticing in Texas data centers (electrician)...
>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.
insane_dreamer 22 minutes ago [-]
Only if you’re one of the few who get to work on the 10%
api 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
codyb 2 hours ago [-]
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?
IshKebab 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
zeroxfe 2 hours ago [-]
> Not everyone benefits from this tech-driven world.
Nobody is claiming that.
savorypiano 2 hours ago [-]
So many? Why not just let the car get repo'd? Sounds hyperbolic.
insane_dreamer 20 minutes ago [-]
I do. Getting a taxi wasn’t bad. I could call a number and have them show up at a given time. And taxi drivers could make a living and weren’t abused by companies like Uber.
I wouldn’t use that as an example of how tech has made the world better.
the_biot 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
>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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
What are you doing now? Still working in tech or something else?
kilroy123 2 hours ago [-]
I feel you. After working in tech for 19 years, going on 20. I am utterly sick of it, too.
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.
dismalaf 2 hours ago [-]
Have you ever worked a blue collar job? Especially for current wages and current cost of living?
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...
ProllyInfamous 16 minutes ago [-]
I left IBEW almost one decade ago; my former local's contract is only +10% since then... in one of the nation's secondary tech capitals!
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™.
uncircle 1 hours ago [-]
My blue collar job will soon be carpentry and fixing up a cheap house. That way I can stop paying exorbitant amounts for rent slavery, and I don’t have to burn out 40 hours a week in tech to make rent.
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.
dismalaf 1 hours ago [-]
So the answer is no. You probably saved up enough for said cheap house and future living expenses from your tech job.
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.
uncircle 59 minutes ago [-]
Thankfully, I do not live in Canada nor in USA, and I do not wish to live anywhere expensive. I just have very modest requirements and acceptance that I will not be able to afford anything better than a fixer-upper.
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.
david38 2 hours ago [-]
Most other things pay a lot less or require many years of expensive schooling
vjvjvjvjghv 2 hours ago [-]
I remember when I complained to my ex wife about work. She just said “welcome to the rest of the us”. Most jobs suck but in tech we at least make good money.
Apocryphon 2 hours ago [-]
One of the greatest comments posted on this site:
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.
There are very, very few jobs that can finance a comfortable middle class life in the United States that aren't largely pointless on a "changing the world"/"helping people"-type scale. Doctors are the only ones that come to mind.
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.
Apocryphon 14 minutes ago [-]
You're moralizing when it's just a good piece of workplace existentialism, in the tradition of Silicon Valley, Office Space, Dilbert, etc.
palmotea 33 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
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.
throwaway81523 2 hours ago [-]
Took me a minute to parse the headline. I thought it was going to be about dystopian science fiction replacing the old space opera stuff, though that already happened decades ago.
JumpinJack_Cash 2 hours ago [-]
SV and SF are a huge mouse trap. And Intellectual Ego is the cheese.
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
SilverbeardUnix 2 hours ago [-]
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.
wnc3141 3 hours ago [-]
For a city famous for its supposed progressive politics, it attracts the most aggressive form of capitalism imaginable.
saltcured 27 minutes ago [-]
In some sense, that duality is true of any functioning city, isn't it? They fundamentally manifest a concentration of capital. But, they also host concentrations of young, working populations who can bring progressive culture in waves.
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.
nextworddev 3 hours ago [-]
Because the former is branding, the latter is the business model of SF
zenmac 2 hours ago [-]
>For a city famous for its supposed progressive politics
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.
wnc3141 2 hours ago [-]
caveat to my above comment, I do think there is a crowd that comes to SF due to proximity to capital. There is also a contingent of longtime residents, who may or may not work in tech and may not espouse the value of the executives they work for.
bugglebeetle 2 hours ago [-]
Listen not to what people say, but instead watch what they do.
sublinear 2 hours ago [-]
> What these tech oligarchs are ultimately telling us, dear friend, is that they simply don’t care about us
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.
uoaei 2 hours ago [-]
In tech circles there is a naive utopianism which comprises the "good intentions" currently paving the road to hell.
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.
pengaru 3 hours ago [-]
The AI story is inherently dystopian. I don't think it says one iota about the SF tech scene, that's more defined by the people in the city than the output of advertising dollars.
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.
3 hours ago [-]
lenerdenator 3 hours ago [-]
... that's scary, because the old one was pretty damned sinister.
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.
anthem2025 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Lammy 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throwirirmr 2 hours ago [-]
Out of all evil things that come out of SF in last decade (millions dead, countries ruined), AI does not even crack top ten. People are just upset because it made THEIR jobs obsolete.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But consensual vaginal piercing is genital mutilation!
Left has internal conflict where they hate "classes" they are "protecting"!!!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Absolutly. I used to work in SF. My startup is remote and we operate in europe. slack + regular meetups is all we need.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
But the feeling of the entire industry being anti-humanity is growing too strong.
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?
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.
Nobody is claiming that.
I wouldn’t use that as an example of how tech has made the world better.
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.
* 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.
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.
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...
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™.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.