> But then I realized this was bigger than one conversation. Every time I shared Wanderfugl with a Seattle engineer, I got the same reflexive, critical, negative response. This wasn't true in Bali, Tokyo, Paris, or San Francisco—people were curious, engaged, wanted to understand what I was building. But in Seattle? Instant hostility the moment they heard "AI."
So what's different between Seattle and San Francisco? Does Seattle have more employee-workers and San Francisco has more people hustling for their startup?
I assume Bali (being a vacation destination) is full people who are wealthy enough to feel they're insulated from whatever will happen.
I live in Seattle now, and have lived in San Francisco as well.
Seattle has more “normal” people and the overall rhetoric about how life “should be” is in many ways resistant to tech. There’s a lot to like about the city, but it absolutely does not have a hustle culture. I’ve honestly found it depressing coming from the East Coast.
Tangent aside, my point is that Seattle has far more of a comparison ground of “you all are building shit that doesn’t make the world better, it just devalues the human”. I think LLMs have (some) strong use cases, but it is impossible to argue that some of the societal downsides we see aren't ripe for hatred - and Seattle will latch on to that in a heartbeat.
Western Washington is very much a "work to live" place, and in a lot of ways there's a feedback loop to ensure it stays that way: surrounded by fellow "work to live" folks who would far rather just get our work done well and head out to the mountains, forests, and seas, the hustle bros will usually leave within a few years. I've watched it happen with quite a number of type-A folks. Exceptions for folks who make it into certain orgs in Amazon or into startup leadership, those seem to be safe places for hustlers around here.
Anyway. I think you're spot on with the "you all are building shit that doesn't make the world better, it just devalues the human" vibe. Regardless of what employers in WA may force folks to build, that's the mentality here, and AI evangelists don't make many friends... nor did blockchain evangelists, or evangelists of any of the spin-off hype trains ("Web3", NFTs, etc). I guess the "cloud" hype train stuck here, but that happened before I moved out west.
Seattle has always been a second-mover when it comes to hype and reality distortion. There is a lot more echo chamber fervor (and, more importantly, lots of available FOMO money to burn) in SF around whatever the latest hotness is.
My SF friends think they have a shot at working at a company whose AI products are good (cursor, anthropic, etc.), so that removes a lot of the hopelessness.
Working for a month out of Bali was wonderful, it's mostly Australians and Dutch people working remotely. Especially those who ran their own businesses were super encouraging (though maybe that's just because entrepreneurs are more supportive of other entrepreneurs).
So what's different between Seattle and San Francisco? Does Seattle have more employee-workers and San Francisco has more people hustling for their startup?
I assume Bali (being a vacation destination) is full people who are wealthy enough to feel they're insulated from whatever will happen.