Our data shows San Francisco tech workers are working Saturdays | Hacker News Reader

Our data shows San Francisco tech workers are working Saturdays

ramp.com

87 pointshnaccount_rng91 comments

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.

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.

What makes the industry run, and has for decades? Adderall. What is Adderall? Amphetamines.

My problem is not that they're going to fail, or even that they aren't going to learn much from their failure. It's that they're going to take many people down with them.

Just to take today's example: there's a npmjs supply chain attack. Dependabot & co are going to issue alerts. Most vibe coders aren't going to know what it's about, or even care. Which means that some of the users of vibe coded apps are going to lose their life savings over this ignorance.

Good time to be in the SaaS snake oil security subscription business...

Aka "Oh my god, I will pay you any amount of money to make this code that I don't have any idea about more secure."

The crypto founder space was full of tweakers in 2014. I imagine a lot of those people have moved to AI as the latest grift on investors.

And the more successful of them have probably traded up to cocaine.

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.

> 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

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.

Is that the case? The main chart they're showing is specifically showing change in behavior from a previous time period.

> Change is equal to the difference between hourly share in 2024 and 2025 from January through August.

The chart is showing year-over-year change from 2024 to 2025

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

I don't think there's a credit card company that can't (or won't) do this. Or even debit cards for the matter. Or any app that has location enabled.

>when your credit card is telling people where and when you work

This article's domain (Ramp) is a SaaS company that tracks employee expenses for other companies.

Tracking employee credit-cards and reimbursements is part of their service that companies use:

https://ramp.com/expense-management

https://ramp.com/corporate-cards

every single credit card company does this.

you can literally buy purchase data from Mastercard, AMEX, and Discover and use this data for retargeting and advanced targeting w ads and run them on Facebook and other platforms.

A dog food purchase? Owner likely has pets, serve em a pet ad, etc.

Im not aware of card networks selling data like this, but there are other players like Yodlee. I used this data for equity trading.

Can I buy such data? How anonymised is it? Source?

The y axis only goes up to 0.4%

edit: see azundos explanation

It's a little difficult to parse but this is hourly share of transactions. If transactions were evenly spread out over 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, each hour would get about 1.8% of transactions. So a 0.4% change in hourly share for a given hour is quite significant.

Makes sense. I appreciate the explanation

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

20% more effective employees thanks to AI

Must be the AI that replaced all the workers that’s ordering all that food

"Our CEO made us use AI so now we have to come in on Saturdays and fix everything."

AI = Again It's-saturday-time-for-another-12-hours-of-in-office-work

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.

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.

The article talks about how they are controlling for the variation across time, and they’re reporting a new signal. So even if everyone was working Saturdays before, everyone is more working Saturdays now. (Edited typos.)

Startups where I get big big bucks if it succeeds? Sure, I'll take a risk and work an extra day. Regular job? Get the hell outta here.

see my profile

preach

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 assume your employer is grateful for your enthusiasm and is paying you for this extra work?

Incredibly cynical mindset portrayed here. When you believe life is just a zero sum game this is all you can think of.

As a grey hair, it's not cynical enough.

Funny seeing your user name. When I worked myself to get ultimately nowhere but money that spends so quickly, the first thing that went was my music creation time.

Having children later in life is much harder/different than having them younger. You don't get to go back.

Your children are only children for a very short time. You don't get to go back.

Much of life is tradeoffs.

Not earlier commenter but their username is a reference to “ableton live” which is music production software. Not “able to live” which is just a one letter difference

"the first thing that went was my music creation time"

I should caveat this by saying this is certainly not 9/9/6, yeesh. Weekdays are fuzzy but never 12 hour days. Do you count going to a meetup after hours as work? A dinner with a prospect? Early coffee with a coworker? Saturdays or Sundays are maybe two or three hours at the most.

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.

1. Learnings and growth.

2. Payoffs if a startup does well.

3. Gets you in the entrepreneurship game. Out of the big tech trap. My first startup did not do well but a ton of us ended up starting companies, entering VC, etc.

"There's [a sucker] born every minute." --P. T. Barnum

"And many of them have CS degrees from good universities." --Me

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."

New trend: extreme hours at AI startups

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

996

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

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

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

It's not, though?

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".

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

I'd actually want to try this. Of course if I can pick a day off every workweek.

Unless everyone else is also working that day.

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

I did a huge amount of travel at various times and never had qualms about checking email or doing some other tasks optionally on days off from time to time, but never considered myself to be "working" on weekends.

I've never checked an email on the weekend or in the evening in my nearly 20 years at this current employer, and have never had any qualms about enjoying my time off.

I check it on my own time, but for my own personal curiosity. “I wonder how that team’s dealing with such and such”, that sort of thing. And my job’s inherently on-call 24/7; if something goes badly, I’ll get notified even if I’m not the primary responder, but that’s so rare that I never consider that when making plans.

I’m perfectly content turning my phone off to go camping or whatever. I also don’t feel bad seeing what my coworkers are up to when I’m out of office.

A lot of people are very binary. Yes, I'd internally grumble a bit if a business trip cut into a weekend for travel. I'd also sometimes check email over a weekend or PTO and resolve something if I could quickly. But I certainly didn't go into the office over weekends (or, indeed, latterly at all). And I never took time off for a doctor's appointment or other personal matters taking less than a full day.

And, to your point, if I did take PTO for vacation, the degree to which I'd be contactable or not was never a factor.

I always had a lot of flexibility so I think it worked both ways.

The best way to not be a workaholic is to not consider all of your time spent working outside of business hours :P

I helped a colleague working on a POC for a customer over the weekend. Was fun! Normally I wouldn’t work over the weekend but I find mentoring and teaching colleagues to be rewarding.

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).

It didn't even occur to you that some people are just interested in the field they work in and you can't stop them from working on saturdays

This. Don't get your downvotes, either. Sometimes you just wanna get something done, and hell, it's usually quiet AF on the weekends in-office, too.

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 think it's about testing how far they can push before their workers push back.

Is that really the world you want to live in? If so, why?

why stop at 7?

Let's use Time Turners to work 8 days in a week.

"Take your amphetamines and be a Team Player, Bob"

The new trend is called 007.

Zero days off, zero breaks, 7 days a week.

The worst part is that you're going to have someone unironically come with this.

There will be a nonzero number of HN commenters who will sincerely and earnestly defend it, too. Not just playing devil's advocate.

Tagline: you can live after we exit

Completely unrelatedly, how are those family formation and birth rate statistics doing?

So, unemployed?

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

Good luck to them when they burn out.

There's plenty of new grads willing to throw themselves into the grind when that happens, they are desperate to even.

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

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

The worst thing is when you get users on this very board with the superiority complex because they pulling 55 hours/week in Cali since more than a decade.

Is it superiority if they can't do/finish their work during standard 40h?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com