Notes on my San Francisco Winter 2024 Visit

I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost 13 years, working in startups as a first employee/cofounder, and then as a designer/engineer in a large company.
I just spent 3 weeks in San Francisco, catching up with friends and former coworkers and experiencing the city as a visitor for the first time.

Here are some things that I found interesting on this trip.

Everyone is into AI

I remember a number of trends - drones, 3D printing, blockchain, crypto,... For each of them, I had maybe a handful of friends working on them. But it was never the case that everyone was working on these things. Everyone I chatted to on this trip was either centrally or peripherally involved with AI.

Another interesting aspect of that is that the AI companies are the hot companies everyone wants to work for. For a long time, FAANGs were the target. Not anymore. It's now OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

Lots of people are job hunting, it's not going well

At any given time, I've always had a couple friends who were job hunting, or taking a break in between roles, etc. I think I tend to associate myself with people who are generally competent - and think of themselves as such. In the past, getting a job offer was never much of a concern for people in my circles.

I now have quite a few friends who have been affected by layoffs, and are actively job hunting. They're struggling to get interviews, let alone offers.

Self driving cars are pretty great

I used Waymo a number of times on this trip. Every time it was a smooth experience. There are still a number of issues to be worked out (SF doesn't have to deal with driving on icy roads, etc) but overall it's getting clearer and clearer that this is happening.

Cars are ridiculous in a large number of ways, but for better and worse they're inextricably tied to the fabric of our modern society. Making them self-driving makes them slightly less crazy on a couple important dimensions.

San Francisco is still the best place to find great (tech) people

I spent a lot of time traveling in 2023, and finally settled down in Tokyo at the end of the year. San Francisco is still the place where you can find the most ambitious, interesting, talented tech people per square mile.

I worked a fair bit from The Commons, a co-working collective, where a friend kindly let me in as a guest.
This is a space that reminds me the most of SF in the early 2010s, a spirit that felt like it faded a bit and then got completely destroyed by the pandemic.

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