Link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/feb/17/ai-startups-work-culture-san-francisco

Not long after the terms “996” and “grindcore” entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn’t taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she’d given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking their shoes off in the office because, well, if you were going to be there for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, wouldn’t you rather be wearing slippers?

“If you go to a cafe on a Sunday, everyone is working,” says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action. Lokuhitige says he works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, minus a few carefully selected social events each week where he can network with other people at startups. “Sometimes I’m coding the whole day,” he says. “I do not have work-life balance.”

Another startup employee, who came to San Francisco to work for an early-stage AI company, showed me dismal photos from his office: a two-bedroom apartment in the Dogpatch, a neighborhood popular with tech workers. His startup’s founders live and work in this apartment – from 9am until as late as 3am, breaking only to DoorDash meals or to sleep, and leaving the building only to take cigarette breaks. The employee (who asked not to use his name, since he still works for this company) described the situation as “horrendous”. “I’d heard about 996, but these guys don’t even do 996,” he says. “They’re working 16-hour days.”

I'd not heard about 996.

no job is worth killing yourself over.

Never heard of 996 but feels like these types of articles pop up every time there's some kind of tech hype cycle going on. Silicon valley is full of IT heroes, ready to sacrifice it all - their families, health, environment - in order to make it big. Get rich or die trying. That's the American Dream, right? Work hard, provide full value to shareholders and some precious honey might trickle down to you. The American "success culture" we Europeans apparently lack.

Meanwhile, here I am, I'm living in northern European social democratic utopia with free healthcare, education and annual, fully paid 6 week vacation while wondering why my 4-day work week is taking so long,.

Different priorities, I guess.

I dunno... What if you got to be the boatman?

This sounds like a US thing, not an AI thing

Americans have had business interests blowing smoke up their ass for so long they just think it's constantly foggy. Canada's not much better, but we do our best given our proximity to source of this madness.

I think it doesn’t help that with AI coding tools
you can now work on 5 different codebases at the same time and you’re able to get shit done so much faster. The maintainability is 0 but the code does the job, until requirements slightly change lol. But for business oriented folks that’s good enough so they just keep operating like that at the expense of burnt out engineers.

Maintainability is fine if you know what you’re doing. But most people can’t write a prompt.

What does it take to emigrate there?

In my experience it's not about writing the prompt, it's refusing 4 out of 5 changes with additional info to refine it.

The problem is that if you don't know what the not should be doing, one random error it does is enough to then make it into the context and propagate everywhere.

I think that directing AI how to do a project requires the same skill as it would to direct junior developers. If you don’t know what you’re doing already, AI is eventually just gonna fail you. But if you do know what you’re doing, AI can be an amazing tool and you can accomplish weeks of work in just hours

It's not even different priorities. I'm convinced it's indoctrinated wage slavery. Some who live under it embrace it, and other endure it depending on their perspective. I suppose some reject it entirely, too, if they're able.

I meant, the priorities for the society as a whole. Our governments and laws are formed accordingly. On individual level it's same here as well. We have people who reject (or abuse) the system, who hate the taxes etc. But our society is formed to provide certain things like free access to education, healthcare and collective social security for elderly and those who can't support themselves.

Ahhh, my apologies. I completely missed your intended meaning. It seems a lot more obvious reading it the second time. Thanks for clarifying. I agree that it seems our governments have different priorities. I hope every day that people learn from countries that treat their citizens better.