From the San Francisco Standard, December 21:
996 workweeks, vanishing entry-level jobs, and an engineer with 44 employers: Here’s a roundup of Silicon Valley by the numbers.
This year kicked off with an image straight out of “The Godfather”: tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos in the front row at the presidential inauguration, kissing the ring.
It’s not a scene many would have predicted in 2017 — or even 2021. And things only got crazier from there.
This was the year of an unfettered, exuberant (dare we say bubbly?) AI goldrush, with fortune-seeking college dropouts packing into hacker houses to grind from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Startup founders struggled to hire engineers, and several even got scammed into hiring the same coder at the same time. Recruiting started to look like the NBA, with AI researchers jumping between companies, sometimes lured by packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars (opens in new tab).
Rage-baiting became a legitimate marketing strategy, and founders began hiring etiquette coaches and attending finishing school to know which soup spoon to use. Longevity went mainstream, and illegal Chinese peptide injections became the latest productivity hack.
All to say that it was a wacky year in Silicon Valley, worth one last look in the rearview mirror. Here are the most eye-popping factoids from 2025.
Secondary sales went gangbusters
Secondary sales — wherein employees and investors sell shares in a private company to outside buyers or back to the company as a way to turn paper wealth into big bucks — began ripping in 2025.
In October, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion secondary sale (opens in new tab) for current and former employees, while SpaceX, Databricks, ByteDance, and other companies offered similar opportunities for staff to cash out their millions.
Many began using those windfalls to buy Bay Area homes — interior designers, real estate agents, and contractors said they’ve never been busier. The influx of secondary-sale millions into the housing market prompted grim jokes that San Francisco renters are being pushed into a permanent underclass (opens in new tab) as nouveau riche techies snap up all available inventory.***
A Gen Z job-apocalypse
For new grads, the job prospects in Silicon Valley turned grim in 2025, as Big Tech and startups leaned into automation and hired more seasoned workers.Hiring of new grads by the 15 largest tech companies has fallen 55% since 2019, according to VC firm SignalFire. The gap between the overall unemployment level and that of recent college grads reached an all-time high, according to census data.“It used to be the land of milk and honey, where students had considerable choice,” Paul Ganting, director of career services at San Francisco State’s business school, told The Standard earlier this year. “But that abundance just isn’t there anymore.”
Waymo and the circle of life....
....MUCH MORE