I’m writing this on a Friday evening from the open-plan office of an “AI first” startup in SoMa. The lights have been dimmed, and half the team has disappeared for craft beer somewhere. At the same time, the other half is pounding away at their keyboards, hypnotized by Figma screen and GitHub issues.
I’m a full-stack developer, but these days, I mostly use typescript and Python. This is my third startup gig since moving to the Bay area four years ago, chasing the dream of building something that matters to the world. What that “something” is shifts with every funding round.
On the paper, the company is doing great: series B closes, Tech crunch articles, and the founder being invited to speak on podcasts. But the internal slack is less glamorous, the product market fit is still elusive, the roadmap is shifting weekly, and engineers like me are burning out. Some days, you feel like youre building a spaceship; other days, like youre patching a leaky boat.
There is an unspoken rule here: working at this startup, no one knows what they are doing. Yeah, there are a lot of talented people here: ex-facing engineers, Standford PhDs, and designers from YC. But the work? Real customers need to drive half, and the other half is driven by investors’ optics and the next funding narrative.
The pace is relentless. Daily standups. Sprint reviews. “Async updates” that are neither async nor updates. The CTO wants velocity, the product wants stability, and marketing wants screenshots for LinkedIn. You’re supposed to do it all, fast and with a smile.
Comp is decent cash plus stock options that may or may not be worth anything someday. The perks help: good coffee, catered lunches, occasional offsites in Napa. But what keeps me going isn’t the kombucha on tap. It’s the people. Despite the chaos, there’s a strange camaraderie in building things with folks who care.
But it still wears on you. Friends outside of tech always ask why I look tired all the time. I tell them it’s not the code; it’s the contact switching, the context redefinition of success. One day, youre crushing it, and the next, youre chasing a new metric because a board member asked about it.
I dont know if this startup will be a big win; maybe it’ll get acquired. Perhaps we’ll pivot again, and maybe I’ll hop into the next big thing. I dont know. But for now, I’m building, I ship, and I learn. And I hope, somewhere between the thousand lines of code, that all this matters.