Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom | Hacker News Reader

Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom

bloomberg.com

188 pointsmancerayder257 comments

I applied to Anthropic a few years ago but didn’t pass the bar on their coding test. I read recently that if I had been hired in that period, my equity would be worth over 40 million based on their current valuation (and i remained employed the entire time there)

It’s hard to mentally reconcile that if I had performed better on a few coding tests a few years ago i would be 100x wealthier than I am today. Whether or not you met the right bar, got into the right company at the right time is the difference between a tedious endless struggle and securing your family’s wealth for the rest of the century.

It's gambling, and semi random. Don't feel bad. Same as stock picks, etc.

It’s not really random when it was clear on account of the caliber of people working there that it was going to be a generational company whether the AI boom took longer or not. The writing was on the wall by the time Opus 3 came out, after it was just a matter of who was worthy for a ticket on the arc.

Same thing could be said of dot com era. Sure the Internet changed everything, but not every company was a winner, quite the contrary.

I felt the same way when I was actively being recruited by Runway ML years ago. It feels like if I had half the knowledge I do now, I would've been the second QA hire (and I had heard that the person they hired instead of me had left with some controversy). My biggest flub was asking an EM about their CI/CD and she took this to mean 'explain CI/CD to me as a basic concept' - something I didn't realize until after the interview.

They got a 300 million Series E about a year after that flub ;_;

Sounds like if I'm smart enough and lucky enough I would have several Billions in my bank account.

But let's be honest, it's mostly luck. Luck being born in the right country, luck being born at the right parents, luck being surrounded by the right social circles. Being smart definitely matters, but it's just a compounding effect on the very large foundation.

Luck is variance and in the US we see the variance is capital transfers from government to family networks that control the corporations and university boards and initiatives

Historians have long debated how rich families and in the last century, rich countries, engage in pay to play for their kids while everyone else's hoe potatoes

Back in the middle ages it was studying theology and convincing the poors to confess sin now it's social theory and therapy to confess feeling anything but allegiance to the factory to grave mindset foisted on blue collar America

Neuroscience has revealed brainwave sync between human meat suits is a physical reality; so we're basically just rsyncing the American conditioning among each other engaging in constant parroting of the civil religion's allowances[1] that there be gentile Mr Burns haves and thoughtless drone sycophants

Absolute quackery[2]. Kirk made whoopie with green skin hotties. Han bounced around. Yet for some reason everyone with power is like "boring missionary with no lights on and zero talking!"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

[2] https://www.them.us/news/elon-musk-anakin-posting

Much in line with Peter Turchin's theory of Elite Overproduction, most Elite Aspirants will not work or educate themselves more than they absolutely need to, in order to live as an Elite.

Usually, most healthy societies have enough places to reasonably allow well educated, competent, people to achieve a high status, regardless of political structure. But as more and more well educated, competent people begin to compete against each other and their predecessors, many Elite Aspirants will become Counter Elites.

Anakin Skywalker ironically fits this perfectly, as he was an overworked child prodigy, born to a slave mother who was killed, and still did not reach the level of Master due to collective mistrust by the (wealthier and detached) older generation, who told him not to worry about his mother as she was being killed.

Behind every Anti-Intellectual movement, is a well educated individual. True for the Oath Keepers and Stewart Rhodes, the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Mao etc. Even if the face of the movement isn't well educated, someone else in the party often is.

The Disintegrative phase of the Secular Cycle will continue, unless the Wealth Pump is addressed, and Asabiyyah (Social Cohesion) is restored, either by the Left or the Right.

> unless the Wealth Pump is addressed, and Asabiyyah (Social Cohesion) is restored, either by the Left or the Right.

The first requires massive societal upheaval, the second likely requires the destruction of the Internet or to spend the next 500 years for humanity to learn to function around the incredibly disruptive effect it has on human communities.

And if we wait the Left or the Right to be the ones to save us, we’ll be engulfed by the Sun first.

We’ll find a way out of this mess, surely, but we still haven’t reached the peak of our malaise. Many of us at this point just want to see everything crash down to hope to start anew, and better.

Don't forget to be very physically attractive too.

Who knows, maybe you never would've been a "culture fit" even if you passed the coding test. By the same logic, if only I picked 2 - 4 - 18 - 50 - 56 - 20 on Powerball last week I would be $760 million richer. It's only a few numbers to get right, wild to think I was that close to being rich!

not even comparable. Lotto is entirely random, signals that anthropic would be hugely successful were not random, but access to the upsides were gated on who had sufficiently amassed capital to buy in

He's talking about interviews, and it seems like a very appropriate comparison. Anyone who's tried and failed the interview gauntlet at almost literally any tech company in the last decade knows that it may as well be a total roll of the dice even if you pass the technical part.

I interviewed with some random company a few years ago, I don't even remember what they did but I know they didn't pay all that well. Passed the technical, and then I needed to 5 seper calls with everyone from marketing to the CTO. Apparently they all had equal weight and I answered some question more vaguely then they'd have liked, and I got an automated rejection. Had CC everyone before I got an answer as to what the problem was. Your shot doesn't only need to be perfect, it needs to be perfect while shooting into the darkness with no glasses on.

Sometimes the dice roll is front-loaded and you happen to sail through, match the vibes, nail the technical, and the second technical, and use AI as much as they want in your workflow, and on and on

The interviews are a fair consideration but the lotto analogy is a non-sequitur. You can’t study for a lotto ticket.

You can’t ace a test and still fail.

You can ace an interview and not get hired.

They're still performance dependent, far from entirely random.

Is it not true though that "performance" is a relatively ambiguous term that, in the context of interviewing, means only what the interviewer/company defines it to be?

If two friends with identical levels of experience in the same technology interviewed at two different arbitrary companies, both saying they performed well, but one gets the job and the other doesn't, it would be hard to say in which way performance was measured, or even how many people they'd speak to before being rejected or accepted. More often than not, nobody can or will tell them. Sometimes there's an objective measure of success in the technical step, sometimes there's not. Sometimes you think you had good chemistry because the conversation flowed fine, and you then get hit with a rejection, and it might have been that someone else got luckier than you that day, got a better sleep, answered one out of 50 questions between all interviewers in a way that was what the interviewer was looking for, went to a school that the interviewer liked instead of another one, etc..

Whether it's truly "entirely" random or not isn't the point, the point is that along with being able to demonstrate the skills you say you have, it's a multi-step series of lucky rolls all the way to the end.

In some cases, you can actually ace the technical skills portion and all of the other portions, and they'll still pick someone else because of arbitrary prejudice.

Well... you're not necessarily studying for most technical interviews in the same way that you would study for a test. You're first taking a guess at what you'll be tested on, how you'll be graded, and often how much time to spend on something, then you're walking into the rest of them. A very volatile chance at every step that isn't always influenced by every former step is indeed not technically the same as a lottery, but in an abstract sense it's not so different.

What's closer to an actual lottery is getting your resume picked. Than you get to study and participate in the blind dog race

You'll have the last laugh when the bubble finally bursts.

Even if there is a bubble, there will be dozens of liquidity events along the way

Paper wealth unless you actually sell. I know several people who were paper decamillionaires in the dot-com boom and then their equity was worth literally zero a year later.

For that matter, that could easily happen to Anthropic millionaires. There's usually a 6-month lockup on employee sales after IPO. They are hoping the stock market (and specifically Anthropic stock) does not crash in the 6 months before they can sell, and this is far from a given in a rising interest rate environment with the potential for renewed hostilities against Iran. They also to be sensible enough to take profits off the table and diversify when they can, which not everybody is.

Fwiw, Anthropic are doing some weird staggered lockup thing, so employees shares start coming online in some strange way much sooner.

I dont remember the details, but its not safe to assume that the first 6m have no employee-shares being sold.

Anthropic's staggered lockup only applies to certain classes of insiders, which does not appear to include regular employees.

It basically allows officers and directors to sell even more of their stock than a normal lockup period would allow for. The only reason for allowing this is if the stock price is expected to drop significantly between the IPO and the expiration of the standard lockup period.

Yeah this hits the sentiment on the head, and I think shows the psychic damage of a system sliding into extreme inequality. My friend group seems to sit along this divide, and it's hard to see the impact that this sort of rumination can have on incredibly brilliant people.

You have 4 million dollars. Be happy about that.

I believe you need to divide by another ten

Good point. I’m a Europoor who got carried away with envy.

we learn the falseness of human exceptionalism at different rates, some learn it on their death beds.

> It’s hard to mentally reconcile that if I had performed better on a few coding tests a few years ago, I would be 100x wealthier than I am today.

Wealth like this sounds great to those not that wealthy, but those experiencing it often aren't any happier than those who have their needs met. Look at any of the tech (b|tr)illionaires; do they seem as genuinely happy/content as the neighbor down the street who gardens regularly and has a tight-knit group of friends and family they spend time with?

Don't get me wrong, money is great! But the "keeping up with the joneses" never stops. You quickly adjust your mindset and feel poor compared to your buddy who has 400 million dollars.

I can assure you that if I had a $40M payday that I'd cash out, never work a day in my life again, and be perfectly content.

Of course that's also part of why I'll never be in a position to achieve a $40M payday, so there's that.

I’m not so sure of that.

The recent Money Stuff newsletter had a blurb about how many anthrophic employees were quitting because you can’t use stock as collateral while working there. That condition only applies to emoloyees so once they left they can do that and rebalance their wealth out of a single position.

I did say if I had a $40M payday. Having purely paper shares isn't a payday in this context, only a liquidation event.

In any event, it'd take a number far less than $40M of liquid cash for me to drop out of the workforce forever.

> I can assure you that if I had a $40M payday that I'd cash out, never work a day in my life again, and be perfectly content.

I recently listened to an npr story on why people work into older ages. Of course some of it is financial need, but a surprising number of people return to work because retirement is isolating. People find missing that structure and need to wake up and work on something with others crippling to their health, both mentally and physically.

I also think I'd do the same if I had a 40M payday, though I'd immediately be thinking about what I need to do for work to fill in those gaps, something physical, social, etc. Something like gardening, working on community gardens, joining a local pottery co-op, etc.

Just something to think about in case you strike it rich someday! In my case, I'm saving for early retirement with a goal of 50 at the latest.

I'd likely do "something" but it definitely wouldn't be tying myself to the grindstone.

I've had the good fortune to wind up with a few funemployment stretches over the years, and yes, I'd go stir crazy quickly if I just went off the grid completely. In fact I learned that the hard way on the first one. But I learned quickly that about 10 hours a week of "something useful" was enough to fill in the gaps. And that paints with a broad brush in terms of what the activity is.

> Wealth like this sounds great to those not that wealthy

It’s also great to the wealthy. Speaking as someone moderately wealthy myself.

Not having to worry about day to day bills, being able to splurge on friends and family for a celebration or when they have an emergency, being able to travel to see things because you read about it in a book and want to check it out, not caring about your credit score and being able to single-handed direct non-profit efforts to achieve civic outcomes they’d otherwise have to spend months fundraising for, all of these are tremendously rewarding. I agree that once folks get into the billionaire bucket there seems to be a negative return on wealth. But going from having to think about the mortgage to not is a major step up in quality of life, and it’s something of a sour-grapes middle class myth that I also grew up with which preaches that wealth isn’t actually all that, hard work is the reward yada yada.

90% of my extended family’s issues and my partners family’s issues could be resolved with 10 million dollars. Sure we would graduate to “rich people problems”, but they don’t carry the same sting of desperation and futility

feel better man, you probably weren't in the running unless you already had an amazing resume, top-tier schools, connections, etc. They have 10,000x applicants for positions, they are probably hard filtering on harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. They are very far from "we just need someone who is good enough at coding". Its more like harvard where they have 3x total open slots of people with 4.0, perfect SAT/ACT, and extra curriculars. That's why its down to "culture fit" and "gut feel" (e.g. connections).

Now if you already have those things (top-tier school, connections, world-class experience on resume), you can probably still and a cushy overpaid position somewhere, just look for somewhere else they are lighting money on fire.

God. Do they want people who did those things but also were the Class President, played a sport and has someone important write a letter?

As someone who thumbed their nose at academia being a proud self-taught techie from Old Schoolia, stuff like that makes me feel echoes of aristocracy (I do have a degree howeve). I recently interviewed a bunch of grads and picked the one who wasn't from an Ivy League - specifically because he showed tons of self-directed learning and curiosity and humility, while the others had grand plans that had absolutely nothing to do with our group function and mission. As someone who's been around a while, some of my worst work experiences were with autistic geniuses who acted proud and mean, and ended up making the environment toxic.

> As someone who thumbed their nose at academia being a proud self-taught techie from Old Schoolia, stuff like that makes me feel echoes of aristocracy

Indeed, but they birthed the god from which they derive divine right.

Kind of interesting how people feel this way. What if I said that anthropic's current valuation was dependent on a bunch of folks getting rejected? Because if you were hired, then others like you would have been hired. Would there have been as much progress or luck with many folks like you? Don't take me wrong, it's not that you are bad at what you do, it's just that you can't guarantee the same present outcome at all.

It's the same claim like bitcoin. Many would say that if they bought bitcoin, then they would've had a massive return. But the bitcoin price is the way that it is because of people not buying early. There's no guarantee that the price would've moved the same if you bought earlier.

Figured I'd just give some food for thought to hopefully make you feel better.

That assumes a static view of competence. Would I, getting into Anthropic just barely past the bar, not have upskilled significantly in such an intense environment? A company is not solely the weighted sum of its composite aptitudes, it is the culture and processes which maximally exploit and nourish those aptitudes.

> not have upskilled significantly in such an intense environment

Those that passed would have still remained ahead, from their continued improvement.

No. If he was hired some other guy would've not been hired. It would not affect number of positions which were filled.

it's difficult to even treat it as an ordered relation when your luck depends on specific questions and the mood of the interviewer.

Same feeling here for OpenAI. Though in my case I knew I wasn't getting it even before the interviews. The first interview was a guy who was a serial founder and the other one was previously a senior staff engineer at FAANG. And if I would’ve been hired, I’d be at the same level as them. I did okay in the interview but clearly didn’t have the experience on paper that they were looking for.

If it makes you feel better all these online calculators are way off because they look at the rise in company value but ignore dilution.

For example if you got a $1M stock grant after Anthropic’s series D round in March 2024, when the company was valued at $18.4B, your stock would be worth “only” 19.5x that today whereas the company has gone up 52x in value. That’s a whopping 63% dilution, because they have raised 4 more rounds since then and all those investors need shares.

The founders themselves have been diluted down to a ~1.4% stake.

Same for the toss up of which country you're born into.

Perhaps, but your skipping dilution and the lock up period. It's unlikely but the stock could perform poorly and significantly reduce that value well before you could cash it out.

You could have bought bitcoin when it was a quarter as well and youd be a billionaire. I have refused to take coding tests for my entire long career. I dont have any deep need to get rich working for these companies.

In fact when I have worked for FAANG I was really disappointed at how mediocre these companies are on the inside.

Maybe Im just different, but I believe in supply and demand and it hasnt let me down during my career. The tech industry has applied 100s of millions of dollars in wage suppression tactics over the years but at the end of the day there is still enough supply and demand for good developers coding test or not.

Good luck with your next interview.

Or more likely, you worked your ass off only for your stock to be worth peanuts once the investors and main share holders got their fix.

When I went to go work at AOL, I asked to delay my start for two weeks, because I had work at my previous job that I wanted to properly wrap up. That resulted in a 50+ page book that described everything I had been doing to that point. I was later told that an entire branch of people was brought in to replace me.

But that two-week delay cost me. I joined in the middle of June 1995, and thus I didn’t get my stock options with a strike date of the 1st of June. There was a stock split between those dates.

In the end, I left AOL with over $16M stock options that had not yet been vested, but by that point it was such a toxic atmosphere that I really had no choice. I would not have been able to preserve my sanity any longer. Had I started two weeks earlier, for the stock options I did cash in, I would have gotten 2x as much money. And I would have left $32M on the table when I left.

There’s no use in crying over spilt milk. And no use in crying over missed stock options or RSUs.

These layoffs are happening because the entire tech industry is sinking all of its free cash into AI capex. H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades, and neither are the proximate cause for these layoffs. If you’re blaming immigrants for this, you are either doing so in bad faith, or you are embarrassingly gullible.

Give them some credit, they can be both

> H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades, and neither are the proximate cause for these layoffs

I agree that the H1B train is a red herring but I explained in my comment how AI has enabled mediocre talent to become more effective. Effective enough where they are "good enough" for what most companies need.

One of the reasons why offshoring was difficult was that asynchronous work wasn't the normal, so what a lot of companies would do is give the uninteresting pieces to the offshored teams.

That's taken a 180 in 2026. Google, OpenAI, Meta are building core infrastructure and software out of India. They don't even have to pay H1B rates.

Tech was already moving towards asynchronous working, expedited post COVID but AI just exponentially accelerated asynchronous work. Bulk of the software in 2026 has been written, reviewed and tested by AI (whether the HN crowd likes it or agrees with the practice, or not). All asynchronously.

These two factors have come together where the average tech worker out of SF is not longer very valuable - companies are just hiring equally talented workers out of Austin or Vietnam, for way cheaper, assisted by token spend.

The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced

Hi, outsourced labourer here.

We also got laid off en masse. Well, I wasn't (for now), but several of my friends were months ago already and I'm not seeing them coming back anytime soon.

Laying off people is such an easy thing to do that no matter the region of the world, it's being done.

It seems like companies are laying off en masse everywhere while also hiring en masse in low COL countries. A few of the major corps HQed in my city have announced massive layoffs at the corporate office while relocating the jobs to a new "remote" HQ in India.

I've seen this enough to know where it goes - companies will move mid level jobs offshore, then relocate their "HQ" from a cheap midwestern city to an expensive one, NYC, Austin, LA, etc. Basically, the executives want to live somewhere expensive and cosmopolitan but they don't want to pay normal workers enough to live in those locations.

I think what you're seeing is change for the sake of change. You're friends will probably find jobs as "AI Engineers" at another company who just did a massive round of layoffs.

This seems like a complete opposite of what you'd expect. Why hire a team of mediocre overseas workers to prompt Claude (your characterization), then have to talk to them only at weird times of day, and have a 12 hour turnaround on anything? Instead you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

> swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

At the scale where hiring overseas workers make sense, there are atleast one PM, QA people, Ops - likely teams, not just one person per, involved. No one is releasing a feature to prod by lunch.

The workflow you propose is a very good representation of SMBs and they are behaving as you have proposed - hire one or two local devs from Austin, call them over Slack and release to prod by lunch.

So yes, this is happening, just wanted to point out that the "overseas workers" workflow is at a different scale of operations.

>Instead you could have one or two local devs from your social circle, swing by their desk at 9am and they have the feature that Claude built merged by lunch?

Because the amount of skill it takes to do that is not commensurate with a salary high enough to afford living in SF.

Then won’t cost of living in sf drop?

eventually but the large share of a person living in SF are their state+city taxes, various fees like parking and rent. Those are not going down overnight but jobs are being lost faster than that.

If it really takes no skill to prompt Claude, then the execs can just do it themselves. Why have someone do it 12 hours later with a language barrier?

Because in any decent sized organisation, the speed at which code is written has never been the bottleneck (even if management thinks that it is.)

Internal turf wars, endless meetings to get “alignment” and pivoting on management’s latest whims are what slows feature delivery.

This is overall correct. Just a nit: openai/anthropic don't have much of an engg presence in India. But yes for all of big tech.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have significant customer engineering: architecture, integrations, evaluations, and production deployments in India. It's kept under wraps because the current administration doesn't want their "We need to win AI" to be overshadowed by "but our money is going to India again!" concerns with voters.

The U.S. is having its midterms - it closes tomorrow - and the next two years are pivotal to who wins the senate for the next 4 years. Having it leaked that billions of dollars of domestic AI spend is going to India is going to sink the GOP.

OpenAI has large offices in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Anthropic is rapidly expanding their Bengaluru office to Mumbai.

India is an extremely large market - there are 4x more people in India than in the U.S, so it's a huge TAM but most of them don't read or speak English so there's a tremendous localization challenge.

India is undergoing a fundamental shift in their economy. They used to be a culture that used to save money before they spend it. Recently I saw a large group of Indian visitors by the Golden Bridge taking pictures and asked them how they could have afforded to save for the trip given the current explosion in prices.

They hadn't saved money - they had taken out loans for the trip. Everyone of them. Apparently their house help earns as much as a teacher in Nonalva, Mumbai (I might have got the city wrong but it sounded like that)

They also focus their students on STEM and are having a tech. hiring crisis (so talent is really cheap). Every engineer speaks atleast 3 different languages, including English and even more local dialects.

Adjusted for cost, the above average Indian engineer assisted by Claude is insanely more valuable than an average engineer from SF assisted by Claude. It's like DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 vs your average US frontier model.

As I said in another comment, $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.

Every market has an upper threshold of costs parties are willing to bear and San Francisco passed it where there's now active demand collapse. Companies are voting with their wallets and people in San Francisco are paying the price.

I am very aware, being indian myself, and have broad knowledge of the tech ecosystem here. Openai/anthropic in india is mostly sales. There is not yet research/engineering roles beyond that.

> but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.

Irrelevant, but just for information, you could provided you're willing to live in a relatively rural area.

> but I won't be surprised if you could retire in India after working on $180k/yr for 2-3 years.

I don’t know what you picture when you think of India but a median 3 bedroom apartment in Mumbai costs about $400k and in Bangalore it’s $200K. And these won’t be the desirable neighborhoods nor newer apartments. After taxes on $180K after 2-3 years, you’d mostly be able to afford a tiny rented apartment for a few years but that’s it.

Nope. None of what was written has anything to do with the actual on the ground reality.

Theres coders across the country being laid off.

OpenAi and Anth have sales and government relations/policy roles that open up in India.

Engineering talent is being reduced everywhere, and being replaced with AI, especially with outsourcing.

I don't know how old you are, but if you were around in the early 2000's there was a BIG offshore fear. More and more they were hiring in India and the Philippines and other places. Initially it was the NOC / L1, maybe L2, and in certain areas.

Not only did it not spread to engineering, but even the L1 and L2 were terrible. I worked in some large environments where working with those offshore folks was universally viewed as a nightmare.

Now, what has changed? Don't tell me Claude. As far as I can tell, these folks make a lot less, and the good ones can easily immigrate to Europe or somewhere else - maybe that has changed. Culturally, you have to often tell them very explicitly what to do and it is not normal to think outside of the box. I doubt that has changed.

So why would we be more afraid than we were in the early 2000's?

Software engineering work changed. I no longer need to know any programming language. I just tell Claude what I need and it writes it for me.

Right. Are you the offshore worker in question?

And even if delegating thinking to the offshore worker to delegate thinking to Claude ... why would you even bother delegating to them in the first place?

> why would you even bother delegating to them in the first place?

because for entire companies, due to outsourcing, there is no other team to delegate to?

Who's the engg. team who writes the website for Best Buy, Target, eBay, Paypal?

The argument is that with AI companies might reconsider outsourcing / offshoring in the first place.

I remember that era. I call AI today Offshoring 2.0 and put up some citations [0]. I remember how it cratered the CS/hiring pipeline for a decade, leading to the competitive frenzy during ZIRP.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125477

>Not only did it not spread to engineering, but even the L1 and L2 were terrible. I worked in some large environments where working with those offshore folks was universally viewed as a nightmare.

>Now, what has changed?

We did.

The sorts of strongly hierarchical/rank based and "follow the process to our obvious demise" type workplace culture that is normal in big companies in the US today would be the punchline of a derisive joke about government/union/academic employment in 2006. Back then there was a HUGE culture gulf between an office in the US and an office in Bangalore or Manila because they ran that way but the office in SF or Redmond or whatever didn't. But in the past 20yr there has been a push to treat people (more than we already did) as replaceable cogs, do everything by committee, divy up responsibility, escalate everything, follow the process when the process and the big picture conflict because it's "not your station" to think about those things, etc, etc.

You can blame it on academia and MBA schools, you can blame it on the culture that we imported with the H1Bs, you can blame it on regulatory posture fanning the flames of all this, IDK, I tend to blame them all. But it absolutely happened. And now that we've incurred the cost of running that way just by virtue of our workplace culture changing there's a lot less operational cost to onboarding an offshore team.

To semi-quote a higher up at $dayJob, at BigTech, talking to his directors: "If your engineers aren't fungible you're bad at your jobs".

Everyone should just be a small cog in a big machine.

yeah, most large employers think like that.

it remains to be seen if thats going to be the way in ~10 years after the dust has settled.

i suspect those middle managers will try to fight tooth and nail to hold onto that status quo, because it leaves them with all the power.

But that's just good management. You can't have your organization struggle because someone gets hit by a bus or quits suddenly.

Hm. To me there's a difference between handling the bus factor: make sure several people on the team knows about things, and fungible engineers: can move engineers between products.

Is there? When someone gets hit by a bus you can't just move another team member into that job; you need to bring someone in from the outside. There has to be some level of fungibility for that to happen.

> good management

I'm not sure I'd apply "good" as a modifier. Being generous, maybe "mediocre."

Good managers know how to find, cultivate, and maximize exceptional people, and that's a difficult job.

I have a feeling that LLMs are going to drastically improve the baseline quality of software. The top end will always require exceptional human involvement, but it will look different.

I disagree. As a manager you're better off accepting a little lower level of productivity from your best employees if it means you don't have embarrassing, to higher management but also to customers, lapses in productivity.

As in most things, it depends.

Mediocre looks for “one size fits all.”

It’s been my experience, that humans; even ones that share much in common, have many different drivers, strengths, and limitations.

Culture also plays a big role. The US has a culture that encourages individual expression, and that’s one of our strengths (and limitations). We can get very good results, if we encourage individual expression, but it's really hard to manage. Irreplaceable people can add huge value to an organization, but they have to be correctly managed, and the organization needs to be structured to let them add that value.

I spent many years, working for a Japanese company, and their culture is a much better environment for “one size fits all.” In their case, it actually became a huge strength, but their approach would not work in the US.

> Good managers know how to find, cultivate, and maximize exceptional people, and that's a difficult job

To use a food analogy; this approach may works very well for a boutique upscale food joint chasing Michelin stars. This doesn't scale to the size of, say, McDonald's. At that stage, variability and creativity are a negative, and guardrails are good. You want literate warm-bodies that can consistently follow well-established procedures step by step. When your engineering staff complement grows over 50,000 - it may get difficult to find (and retain) those who are "exceptional".

It's not just about scale either, if you're a content, sole-proprietor hole-in the wall operation, (expensive) exceptional people aren't going to move the needle,and may even be detrimental to your viability.

Exactly. It depends.

Fungibility is tangential to the sort of culture shift I'm talking about.

Imo it's almost the other way around.

If you just want mediocre code that technically meets the requirements of a Jira ticket bashed out as cheaply as possible, an LLM can do that, you no longer need to hire a junior offshore to save money

That's exactly it. That's why I don't see why putting up with time zone and cultural differences in work style not to mention communication complexities from these, are worth putting up with versus using Claude code.

Unless... God, what if they decided to use agents to manage their offshore "resources". That sounds like the utopia some are salivating over.

Part of the offshore story is why I have way less care for big name journalism complaining about AI job loss or the like.

I remember their cheerful atmosphere about "geeks" getting pushed back down thanks to offshoring

>and the good ones can easily immigrate to Europe or somewhere else - maybe that has changed

Yes, that has changed. Europe and USA are closing their borders for immigrants. And I don't know if that is the reason, but these international offices in India and some South America countries are hiring way more than 3 years ago. That said, USA and Europe are still top-notch in quality of life, no matter what naysayers believe. So you will still have a lot of great talent wanting to move there

The talent pool in India has always trended towards mediocre. Highly skilled candidates do exist of course, but in a sea of diploma mill graduates they are extremely hard to find.

Companies have decided that a mediocre employee with Claude is now good enough, especially at the offshore price point.

Basically this, and it will get extremely worse. These regions will greatly benefit in the near term.

However, the mediocre India talent pool shouldn't be expected to drive Claude very well. The impact to companies will be devastating once they realize that in about 6-12 months when they finally notice they have to deal with the piles of garbage that were created. This isn't a dig against AI. If the existing talent pool cannot understand the engineering aspects of what they are doing today, then giving them AI will make it even worse.

> The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced

What does highly skilled even mean nowadays / with Claude Code?

Everyone has gotten a boost in effectiveness because they're using the same multiplier. No one really cared before how bad some developers were because they were likely cheap, onshore or offshore.

This is correct, Google/FAANG can no longer keep all the H1B employees they had housed under there umbrella for 10+ years.

They are not allowed to sink their free cash into R&D and not get heavily taxed for it anymore. Wouldn't the same apply to AI capex?

Didn't the R&D tax law revert back with OBBBA?

>H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades, and neither are the proximate cause for these layoffs.

They were tolerated by the domestic workforce because times were good. Times are no longer good, so they're no longer tolerated.

You see this sort of pattern in all sorts of issues, not just H1Bs and tech.

Previous decades didn't do remotely work as well as we are now. Also South America is a cheap option now. Language is less of an issue and more culturaly similar to the us

Off-shoring has definitely been a factor in layoffs over the past few years. It came back pretty strong around 2023-2025. I agree that any new cuts will likely be due to AI. Hiring has more or less ground to a halt regardless of location now.

You could (and should) have made this point without the personal attacks. Something like "if you're blaming immigrants for this, you are greatly mistaken".

> H1B abuse and offshoring have both existed for decades

Yes, and they've had negative effects for decades and shouldn't be shielded from criticism because of whatever new thing.

> If you’re blaming immigrants for this, you are either doing so in bad faith

The bad faith thing is to round off the criticism to "blaming immigrants" because it creates a more convenient moral landscape for the argument.

Sure, but let’s not forget that ~90% of the Bay Area does not work in tech. They are all being left out of the AI boom, similar to how they were left out of every tech boom before it. Don’t see why we need to specifically weep for these ex-FAANG engineers because they couldn’t get into OpenAI or Anthropic.

This isn't exactly true because some others participate indirectly. The most obvious winners are the people who bought housing or other real estate. There are also non-programmers who invested, the most famous may be the Persian carpet dealers in Palo Alto who've been investing in startups on the side.

Yes, there are many who don't own their house, but some of those can also benefit. California has some of the most generous social benefits in the nation, all because they can tax the tech companies.

Never heard of these carpet dealers but you have any more info ?

A lot of it is local politics too. The Bay Area has chosen very hostile to economic growth policies especially around zoning/ affordable housing etc.

So it’s like if they keep voting for people who are anti growth it seems like the expected outcome to be left out. I.e. if new apartment buildings are largely banned, you don’t get the opportunity to open a coffee shop or work as a building manager.

"A group of more than four dozen laid-off workers gathered at 11 a.m. on a Monday to hike Mount Tamalpais, a majestic peak overlooking the San Francisco Bay. They descended the mostly deserted trail in groups of about a dozen, led by Basem Istanbouli, a former Google employee sporting a bucket hat and a pair of toe shoes."

I'd rather hike than sling JavaScript for a bunch of finance goofs, but that's just me.

Hiking doesn’t buy much food and shelter

My point still stands.

if they brought tents they might be scouting their new neighborhood

A lot of those laid off were doing fine financially anyway unless they blew it all on stupid things.

"Blew it all on stupid things" like the insane mortgage/rent prices need to live in SF?

If the pay is the same I fully agree. But it is not.

Imagine not thinking about "pay" all the time. Try it.

I did try it. Then the mortgage late notices started to pile up. Then the IRS started calling. I don't recommend it.

If a job had ever stuck around long enough to feasibly pursue a mortgage, I've have not got one on the basis that I'd suspect the job wouldn't be around much longer after that. Maybe real estate in various places will start lowering when there's no way to pay for multimillion dollar bungalows anymore

Imagine not thinking about “food” and “shelter” all the time. Try it.

I'd love to! Based on FIRE-style calculations I'd need approximately 2 mil at the current cost of living in my city. But if you'd help relocate my household internationally, I could get the cost down considerably. Where can I send the bill?

I don’t have to any more but I recognize that few have such luxury.

Me too! But then I realize I'd also like good health care coverage on the off chance I disturb a rattlesnake or crack an ankle while on said hike.

> Demand for software engineers in the Bay Area has fallen 42% since 2022, according to Lightcast, a labor-market analytics firm. Jobs tied to AI-related IT and computer science, meanwhile, have jumped 37%.

How much of this is just everything IT-related being rebranded as AI?

To be fair, 42% decrease in one bucket may not match 37% increase in another bucket in absolute numbers.

are they exclusionary terms?

What do you mean?

Are the buckets mutually exclusive?

Ok, so, are they? What of it?

then they don't need to add up to exact percent numbers

And SF tech workers don't even have a hukou that gives them the right to go back to their village.

China has a "return to village" program for people who didn't make it in the big city. Here's the propaganda version of that.[1] Return to the land. Go back to being a peasant. Survive on 0.3 hectare? That's a back yard, not a farm.

[1] http://english.scio.gov.cn/in-depth/2024-07/30/content_11733...

I love it

> you live in the best time to exist in history. Stop complaining. Imagine how bad it would be if you were a poor peasant farmer like all those people before you

> We don't need you anymore. Have you considered becoming a poor peasant farmer?

Isn't farming mostly automated anyways? I can't imagine China needs masses return to the fields for any reason other than go keep them occupied.

> Now he’s parsing job titles like “AI strategist” and “AI engineer,”

I have seen things like this. They often just look like backend swe jobs though? Are people getting these kinds of titles without masters in ML? Or pivoting somehow?

> Now, one of the most popular jobs in tech may be forward deployed engineers,

This is true? Are people pivoting to this really?

Yes. It’s pretty trivial to pivot to, for these non-training/inference roles it’s just building systems where agents are the core implementation detail.

From what I’ve seen jobs that need deeper domain knowledge will call out “ML” or “research” in the job title.

Everything else is just an inflated title to make the company seem AI forward.

Experienced devs have been through several loops of this process. Regardless of the theory behind each word, in practice it's just code words to prove you're part of the in group and updated.

In the past you might have been asked to add to the CV that you're into devops when you're just expected to trigger deploy jobs, or to explain that you take data-driven decisions when you're just adding some metrics to a powerpoint to justify a move that would have been done anyway, or to define yourself as a product engineer when they just want you to give a crap about users and be able to interface normally with managers.

Now there's a lot of "forward deployed engineers" that are actually just consultants or people interfacing with third parties, or AI-native devs that are just a guy using claude and maybe touching a couple mds.

This is not to say that significant changes aren't coming to the field, but the job application buzzword game is business as usual.

> Or pivoting somehow?

Existing companies are converting their desirable staff to these titles.

Half of my team are now "AI engineers" of some sort. It's really just indicative of who uses Claude/Codex the most.

It's not that different from when "sys admins" became "devops engineers", "db administrators" became "data engineers", etc.

Makes sense, has it effected how hiring is done or resumes are screened?

I'd say the solution would be to move out of the Bay Area and inland, where there were always fewer jobs but also fewer people to fill them. Wages are certainly lower there but so is the cost of living.

But is the downturn due to A.I.? I doubt it. The job market was booming after COVID and companies were hiring like there was no tomorrow. Things are now settling down to sane levels and means many will lose their jobs.

Also there's a general downturn from import tariffs and higher energy prices.

Are there a lot of software jobs inland? Moving to Montana is nice from a cost of living POV but unless your goal is to become a rancher or miner, there’s not a hugely booming software engineering market.

The people I know who work in these AI roles that demand exorbitant salaries are not what I expected. It seems as if they simply had the right network and benefitted from nepotism. The products from the AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are not impressive and it seems like anyone can replicate it for free in a few days. I am disappointed about it because the leaders in AI are not even good. The layoffs weren't warranted and any of the people in the article could have easily been hired. I disagree with the perspective that the article suggests. It's not that there are winners and losers. There are only losers.

EDIT: Downvotes incoming so I am blocked out of responding to comments for 8h.

San Francisco is one of the most expensive places on earth. $180k/yr doesn't go very far in San Francisco specially if you want to have a family. Dual income becomes pretty much mandatory and if one of those incomes are lost, things start to get tough.

Pretty much anywhere else in the US (outside some parts of the East coast) and almost anywhere in the world, $180k/yr is an amazing salary.

Tech was already moving towards asynchronous working but AI just exponentially accelerated asynchronous work. Bulk of the software in 2026 has been written, reviewed and tested by AI (whether the HN crowd likes it or agrees with the practice, or not).

"AI" has, and will, suck out capital out of the market - this, coupled with non-zero interest rates is putting companies under pressure where cost savings is the top, if not one of the top priorities.

So these two conversations are happening in every board and executive room in San Francisco:

- SMB/startups: Can we go faster with less people if we load up on tokens? Yes.

- MNCs/Large Orgs: Are our engineers out of Austin or Asia equally productive with AI assistance? Yes.

So the decision is simple: San Francisco's expensive engineers and tech workers are useful in a rapidly contracting niche. They are still valuable for startups based out of SF (but the startups are just hiring less than they used to). They are still valuable for rapidly expanding companies based out of SF that are not yet having the cost discussion - Anthropic and OpenAI are certainly hiring.

But rest of the companies are just hiring equally talented workers out of Austin or Vietnam, for way cheaper.

The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced.

That said, AI is making it increasingly easy to start your own business. I certainly have been encouraging people to find their own customers before their (ex)employer forces them to.

San Francisco is expensive because the competition for both technical talent and housing is fierce. The dynamics you’re describing existed from 2020-2022, and as a result it became cheaper to live here. Today, the rent is going up again, because companies are locating and hiring here again. San Francisco is not just magically an expensive place.

> San Francisco is not just magically an expensive place

but it is to people outside tech. I argue, pretty soon, San Francisco will become a magically expensive place for anyone outside AI

Now a shock to the HN audience: Around 90% of the Bay Area population does not work in tech!

> Today, the rent is going up again

AI is minting billionaires who can afford to purchase a lot of housing. San Francisco is supply constrained on housing.

Pricing of homes in San Francisco are going up because a lot less people are getting really rich and offering millions over asking price for the few homes that are up for sale.

An average person's income didn't go up in San Francisco. They suddenly don't have more money to pay in rent or a mortgage.

The life of an average person in San Francisco is not rosy nor indicative of this growth and that is the point I'm making and evidence that the article provides.

Yeah, seems like if you're living in a boom area you would be there for as long as you personally are booming. I think big city areas in general are expensive to live in. There's a LOT of space in the world where decent savings in boom area would cover you for most or all of your life. And the more people who are in boom areas, the more expensive it is to live there. So of course it makes sense that the dude at the top of the article is "jobless" as if he is... ?

The picture reminds me to the painting Without Bread and Without Work[1]. Very good photographer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_Bread_and_Without_Work

This is not the experience I have with the SF tech scene. I moved to Canada from SF to raise a kid and even now have a lot of startups offering jobs on a TN visa or similar. There are days when I feel like taking the offer as the Canadian tech scene and opportunities are non existent.

Ya it's admittedly pretty rough here in Canada, at least on the west coast. At least it's beautiful, less toxic, free healthcare, better protections for rights. The single legit invitation to interview I've received was for some SF bs startup that was heavily emphasizing being AI first in every aspect, constant pivoting, calls, unclear what the actual product was but it reeked like garbage.

If it weren't for healthcare, despite the lack of income for presumably the next year, I assume I'd be screwed.

Just remember that Silicon Valley started when a few tech founders moved from New Jersey to California and created an ecosystem. LA movie industry was the same. Both industries were in New Jersey. Lesson is to create a scene.

Syndicated at https://www.fa-mag.com/news/jobless-tech-workers-are-being-l...

The dichotomy of groups who say AI is making us so efficient we don't need as many SDEs and and knowledge workers and we also need to import skilled workers and also if you don't do that then they'll just offshore those jobs so why are they onshoring them in the first place.

It's just all so contradictory and dishonest. It's an important topic to discuss because the gravy train is ending for all of us, regardless of which border you reside within, but too many people get way too emotional as soon as you bring it up.

One would assume they'll also be left out of the inevitable bust in six months to a year's time when the money people come looking for the ROI.

Everyone unemployed anywhere is by definition being left out of the AI boom. Unemployed electricians are being left out too. It's a tautology.

But this is merely small subset of the cohort being left out, Bloomberg!

Sounds like they just enjoy the early retirement.

Unless you fit a certain very narrow demographic and career profile, SF is a shitty place to actually live. I understand that some people have an emotional or family attachment to it but honestly most of them would be way better off in the long run if they just moved. We can debate all sorts of hypothetical government policy changes that would make the city more livable and affordable, but come on, realistically most of those aren't ever going to happen. At some point you have to accept reality.

Where though?

In terms of effective income, there are loads of places. Like, yes, I took a paycut moving from SF to the Seattle Metro, but I was able to buy the kind of house I'd need to live in Tracy to afford, within the same (time) commute that I had from Oakland to the South City. I have a peculiar affinity for Seattle that I don't have for, say, Portland, so it was an easy choice. I actually really appreciated SF as a city, but I also moved there just before the COVID lockdowns hit, and the Bay Area is a profoundly unpleasant place when lockdowns force it into endless-suburbia mode.

Denver is very much the same as Seattle (although I'd argue its got less going on culturally than Seattle).

There are a number of cities where yes, you'll make less objectively, but the cost of living is low enough that that's a wash. You'll have less prestige and maybe work on less important projects. But if that's important to you, why are you pinning your cards to someone else's mast instead of striking out on your own?

A you looking for a list or something? It's a big country. There are a zillion places to live that are better than SF in most ways, depending on your priorities.

Whenever someone suggests a specific alternative city here we always get a lot of lame complaints that the proposed alternative is unacceptable due to weather / jobs / transportation / politics / food / family ties / blah blah blah. I think a lot of people just prefer to complain instead of taking action to improve their situation.

But anyway if you want a specific location then try Cleveland. It's a nice place to live.

>"Where though?"

NYC is an infinitely larger, more varied, interesting, and multi-cultural city than SF. Better transit and more affordable too, while reaching similar salaries. Anyone who's not drinking the tech-bro kool-aid but still wants to be part of the industry at the highest levels should be there.

Okay but what if they are outdoorsy and like to spend weekend in places like the Sierras, snowboard/ski, and proximity to national parks? How’s NYC for that crowd?

>"Okay but what if they are outdoorsy and like to spend weekend in places like the Sierras, snowboard/ski, and proximity to national parks?"

Whiteface and Killington are about the same drive as Tahoe from SF, with vertical on par (3k+). Catskills even closer. There's no Yosemite obviously, but upstate NY/Vermont is as good as it gets east of the Rockies.

Okay so a handful of small and medium resorts by Tahoe and mammoth standards exist and there’s forested areas... “As good as it gets east of the Rockies” that’s exactly my point. It’s not NYC’s fault, it’s just not comparable. NYC is definitely a bigger city, and will be fine for some.

glancing at a light pollution map of the USA is really revealing as well.

Yes you can go out of the city, or upstate and get all of those things. NYC has great city parks as well. Prospect park comes to mind specifically.

Have you driven 395?

No no don’t listen to ramesh31!! nyc is dangerous and has terrible weather and limited/terrible outdoor activities on offer!

I deeply regret moving here from California over a decade ago and am eagerly awaiting to one day return soon.

The way you said “face reality” implies a lot of delusion.

There’s a lot of nostalgia. Both for what the city used to be and what I potentially can (but most likely won’t) become. The delusion is so rampant that it’s really what causes people to vote you (and me) down. Like objectively speaking sf is a terrible city and many people agree. At best you can like the city but you cannot ignore the fact that there are some pretty horrible downsides for living here and that many many people hate the city.

I will say if you work in tech or are a liberal extremist or you’re gay then it may be worth it to live here but I wouldn’t call it wonderful. You can’t make the city better if you don’t admit the faults.

San Francisco is one of three cities in America where you can walk to things. A lot of people don’t value that, and that’s fine, those people should all leave

The second (or rather, first) is obviously New York, but the third is… Boston, Cambridge (if counted separately), Philly, DC, Chicago, Seattle…? There are more than three cities where “you can walk to things”.

Some Californians seem to think snow is fatal, but yes to all of these. I will acknowledge that SF has a pretty wonderful mix of city and nature but if I made a living out there I'd probably head to Spain/Portugal for a truly walkable city.

TIL I’m a “liberal extremist” for liking the weather, the walkability, views, and plentiful activities that comes with so many people in a small area.

It used to not be like this. As a tech worker, i can say objectively that tech workers ruined SF. Rent was more expensive than South Bay but only by a couple of hundred dollars per month. In 2005 I paid $1700/month for a rent-controlled 700 sqft 1 bedroom in near Noe Valley. I later moved into another rent-controlled 500 sq ft studio on Twin Peaks with a view of the Bay for $1200/month in 2008.

I had friends who were artists and graphic designers that lived in a 2-floor 4 bedroom apartment in Noe Valley with incredible views of the Bay. They were paying $3200/month combined, so $800/month each.

That time was probably one of the best in my life. There was always something to do in SF, we would go out every weekend, go to bars, clubs. Golden Gate park for sports, free outdoor concerts like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, I saw Robin Williams perform comedy one year for free and most importantly it wasn't crowded. People didn't think that their social media life depended on them going to an event or a restaurant and posting about it.

It started getting worse because of the 7x7 list and lines grew longer because people wanted to follow that list like sheep. Then more and more tech workers drove up the prices until all my friends that I used to hang out with moved out of SF to other parts of the country. DC, LA, Denver. All their apartments got replaced by tech workers. SF is now a mono-culture and pretty destroyed if you ask me. Everything is overcrowded, unaffordable and overhyped. It's a real disappointment to see one of the most beautiful cities in the world rot from the inside.

You're basically me. Except I would not say it was the best time of my life. It was the most interesting.

Where’s those other highly walkable cities (by American standards) with great running weather, plentiful amazing views, and diverse restaurants and activities?

I’ve apparently been overlooking all of them!

Do you mind being slightly drizzled on?

If not, Seattle/Bellevue are a great option. Or Portland even.

Seattle as in Amazonville? Explored there a bit last summer, pass. All cited items are worse.

Portland I’ll admit haven’t explored well, so not going to give a judgement.

If you think Seattle is Amazonville and worse in all ways than SF, it sounds like you visited South Lake Union and no other part of the city. Amazon's footprint is pretty limited outside of SLU, which is one of the least interesting neighborhoods in the city. Downtown just south of it also sucks.

Ballard, Capitol Hill, Alki, University, Sunset Hill... The list goes on. Every single one of those neighborhoods has a completely different vibe (many of them used to be different cities). Incredible restaurants if you put in the slightest amount of effort to finding them. Tons of fun and interesting activities. The city is on a hill above the ocean (JUST like SF), the views are hard to avoid. Year round running weather. It may be that you just like SF more, and that's fine.

I ran every day I was there in different directions including a 16 mile loop to the tip of discovery park, it’s not a great running city, and its views aren’t particularly great.

Sure it’s okay, not as nice for running as SF or Vancouver but yeah far better than Phoenix and SoCal cities.

Maybe I went to the wrong areas, but it sounds like I was supposed to get to the sprawling suburbs?

None of the neighborhoods I mentioned are suburban. If you don't recognize them, it sort of tips your hand at not knwoing the city at all, as much as calling the entire city "Amazonville". Discovery park isn't known for views, there are other places in the city that are. Ballard is not some sprawling suburban neighborhood, its typically one of the most recomended places in the city to visit. You get there by walking the lakefront bike path from SLU (which is actually "Amazonville"). Capitol Hill is a 20 minute walk from downtown. Alki isn't walkable from downtown, but you can take the passenger ferry. I don't know where you got the idea of "sprawling suburbs".

You are allowed to personally like one city over the other. It just seems silly to base your opinion on living in one and a few days in another, and then argue when people point out that it seems like you haven't really done or gone to the places that make a place interesting.

> highly walkable, diverse activities

I don't think Bellevue fits the bill here, but certain Seattle neighborhoods do.

In the real world you'll have to compromise on some of your priorities.

Okay. Why compromise when I get all those in SF?

No compromise needed on those points, the compromise is living in a smaller apartment, but it’s okay since now my backyard is Golden Gate Park.

I was in the Bay Area for almost 2 decades. I’m familiar with this mindset. There are so many compromises you make living in the Bay Area … like any other location.

More traffic, fewer families, faster pace of life, etc.

The Bay Area has its pros and cons.

Well keep in mind this thread is in the context of the top level comment being “Unless you fit a certain very narrow demographic and career profile, SF is a shitty place to actually live”

So yes I compromise on apartment/house size because I value walkability, local activity density, and year round running. Guess that makes me part of the “very narrow demographic” in USA.

the things that people mention as compromises - expensive for families, traffic, small living space - aren't things that are make or break for me. i don't plan to have kids, bypass traffic on my bike, have the city as my living room, rent is relatively less of a burden because my remaining spend revolves around food.

I would agree with you, until I asked someone who lived there how it is that people working normal jobs like Bartenders can afford to live anywhere in SF.

I was told that there are rent-subsidy programs that allow people making relatively low wages to pay e.g. $300-800/mo for a 1-bedroom apartment

My thought after hearing that is that, unless you're making north of $300-400k, it's probably better to make around $50-60k and collect subsidies + benefits. The middle income group gets shafted.

Why live somewhere and be dependent on subsidies if you can move and be independent?

I lived in the Bay Area for 17 years. Enjoyed the time but it’s “for a season”. It’s common for folks in the Bay Area to look at other locations as “lesser”. In reality, it’s about tradeoffs.

For those low wage earners, you're not going to get a large deal of independence by doing the job in Des Moines compared to San Francisco. You'll still be scraping by, possibly saving a little bit but not much.

It depends on what you mean by "low wage earners". You can own a home and save money in virtually all of the United States as a teacher or someone doing anything in tech. You could also be a single income family if one partner makes $150k.

That's a lot of independence.

There’s a lot to unpack about this, from this is being result of capitalism (or hyper capitalism in US) and not AI, all the way to this would not have had happened if software or tech people were “street smarts” rather than just logical smart, they basically shot themselves in the foot, they went crazy on automating their own work to the point when the boss saw the work is too automated to need them, they got fired, meanwhile if you look at other sectors (healthcare, education, legal, etc.) they immediately lobbied to prevent such case, they allowed the use of AI but they are still the gate keeper of it: “oh you need to use AI in a healthcare matter?! Nope, can’t do that without a licensed practitioner!!” It’s simply to make sure they are not going to be jobless within 5y.

Solutions? Well, it varies from how invested you are to solve it, are you open to tame capitalism and dismantling the concept of infinite growth and minimizing expenses while maximizing profits? Or are you open to regulate the tech market just like other sectors, and mandating a human gatekeepers regardless of how smart the AI is? There are many solutions but I highly doubt any will be done in the current political atmosphere.

> Or are you open to regulate the tech market just like other sectors, and mandating a human gatekeepers regardless of how smart the AI is?

The doctors and nurses might feel smug and cozy having pulled off a hiest and putting regulation in their favor for now but you know who are even better at pulling off hiests and putting regulation in their favor? MBAs and corporate attorneys.

The fat salaries of doctors and nurses are going to be squeezed out into the hospital's bottomline and the doctors and nurses won't be able to do anything about it because the very drama they pulled off to get to where they are will be used against them. It's already happenning - wages for doctors and nurses aren't growing and they are being eaten away by inflation. It's very likely they will make the same amount of dollars in 2036 that they make today.

Even specialists like surgeons are not going to be spared: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50336138

The tech industry has chosen not to play dirty and we don't have to.

AI is making it increasingly easy to start your own business. I certainly have been encouraging people to find their own customers before their (ex)employer forces them to.

Starting your own business isn't for everyone and it's scary but it's no more difficult or scary than 12 rounds of tech interviews.

Let's continue to make the pie bigger instead of putting restrictions on who can even get near the pie.

> AI is making it increasingly easy to start your own business.

Why do you think entrepreneurship will be spared? Funny how you dunk on surgeons but then claim that you yourself are "protected" in the same breath.

> Funny how you dunk on surgeons

I linked to the article that proves there's a path to replace surgeons. I don't see any other way to interpret that article.

> Why do you think entrepreneurship will be spared? Funny how you dunk on surgeons but then claim that you yourself are "protected" in the same breath.

Because entrepreneurship cannot be done by sitting in a room typing away at a keyboard.

You have to go out, talk to people but more importantly observe them, listen to them lie, tease out what they are actually willing to pay for from what they claim they will. Then you have to talk to investors.

Doctors used to be similar - they would listen to patients lie (most of the times unknowingly) and then ask probing questions. In 2026, no doctor who works at a hospital is allowed to do that. The hospital schedules their day back to back, they get to spend maybe 5-10m max per patient and figure out what tests to order and how to triage their concerns. All conversations are recorded and transcribed, fed to AI for training.

What used to be one visit with a doctor for 30-40m is now 10 visits, each 5-10m max scheduled back to back. Hospitals are working on replacing doctors with AI so those fat salaries can go to the bottomline.

This assumes people don't increasingly let AI make decisions for them.

Exactly. If I need a new supplier for my business, why would I ask around, listen to pitches, negotiate, sign contracts, monitor quality, etc.? I should be able to ask one of my AI agents to do all of that. And when the new supplier does not work out, I re-prompt my agent.

do you run a business or is this a hypothetical?

if you run a business, are you perfectly happy with it or are there a few things that worry you or even keep you awake at night that you would like to address?

and that people still have money to spend

> You have to go out, talk to people but more importantly observe them, listen to them lie, tease out what they are actually willing to pay for from what they claim they will. Then you have to talk to investors.

Was this supposed to make it obvious? I don't see why AI/LLMs can't solve all these problems.

At least in your line of work, you can make a mistake and undo it before it causes any problems. Surgeons don't have it that easy.

I’m just waiting for medical tourism to be supported by insurance, think about it, insurance could pay less by having you fly out to Costa Rica or someplace to get things at 1/10 the cost. Hell they could outsource everything to Cuba if they weren’t mad about something that happened like 60+ yrs ago

You would never get the quality of care you expect if you went to a place like Cuba. That's a problem with medical tourism in general.

I don't know about cuba specifically, but for a majority of conditions most major cities in the world have good, modern medical care available. I have first-hand experience of this on at least seven countries on three continents just on incidental medical needs, and know others who have described much the same experience in several countries I've never visited. Compared to the US, prices are quite low across the board, even for non-citizens who have to pay out of pocket, due to the unique way the various US industries involved in healthcare have dramatically driven up prices. Medical tourism is sometimes even worth it for people who have insurance.

What kind of problems were you getting addressed, though? It's mainly an issue when you're getting major surgery or treating something serious like cancer. Cuban doctors don't have access to the same suite of diagnostic tools US doctors have. They're probably fine if you need your blood pressure meds adjusted, but how likely is it you'll get an MRI if you need one?

There's a hospital in Bangkok named Bumrungrad that is set up for medical tourism. From what I hear it provides world class care, including diagnostics. But it's almost as expensive as going to a hospital in the US once all your costs are accounted for.

It seems like a bad idea to go to a hospital that specifically is trying to gouge foreigners. I've been to other hospitals in Bangkok specifically though, including for emergency care, and they for the most part charge a tiny fraction of what US ones do, and seem to provide a good standard of care, albeit one with considerably less theater involved

Nurses have strong unions that this year made big gains for their members. Why would this change ?

There are H1B armies of regular people, doing regular jobs, that require no critical skills, making decent wages, at the cost of the American worker/Graduate. Thank your Gov for allowing corporations to fill their ranks with slave labor. It all starts with a particular kind of CEO, CIO/CTO and it guts the technology department of American employees.

If they can't do that then they just offshore it. The big tech firms are increasing their presence and offices in other countries for cheaper labor.

Offshored workers don't compete with me for food, housing, education, etc.

Then let them. If they want to offshore, let them have the associated pros and cons, and free up real estate that American workers can use to start competitors.

You're competing with 2 billion Asians. We're never going back to the 1950s no matter now much people cry about it.

Wrong. I'm SE Asian background but American. Why should Americans compete with Indians from India in America? Just because globalists enable it, it doesn't mean Americans are OK with it.

They've been offshoring as much as they can for decades. The H1-B program hasn't stopped it and if it were eliminated there wouldn't be a huge surge in offshoring. Many companies have already hit the limit on offshoring and had to pull things back onshore.

What kind of CEO, CIO/CTO?

The kind that has a strong in-group bias and likes to hire from his own ethnicity, gradually taking over departments.

There's such a kind? Got some data (not anecdotes) to support this?

Trump already charges $100K in taxes for each. Is this not enough?

Clearly not

I liked the idea (even as a former h1b holder) but it seems tied up in court and nobody is paying it yet

That ended up not happening.

> making decent wages ... slave labor

Wages aren't the primary determination of slave labor, it's control. I suppose "indentured servant" would be even better, but there are an enormous number of restrictions on H1B holders in how they move (both between employers and countries).

(I don't love this analogy and consider it extreme and not overly accurate)

Why do we need an abysmal analogy when "H1B holder" describes it well enough?

Do you not understand that analogies are used for people who don't understand what H1B holders are, or what the user of the analogy thinks of them?

I doubt you'll find many HN users who don't know what a H1B visa is. That's regardless of my opinion that comparing H1B holders to slaves or indentured servants is a bad analogy.

"Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!"

Random refugees coming into the country "takin my jerb" isn't happening. Large companies importing skilled labor for specific positions to either drive down sector wages or acquire workers who are more willing to put up with bad working conditions (this is nursing right now) is a different beast.

Thats not what the issue is, it's that they aren't free to job-hop in the way that other people are. H1B keeps their wages artificially depressed and they have a sword of damocles over their heads threatening deportation.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34793/w347...

Let make British East India Tea Company Great Again!

It’s so weird how this is getting downvoted. It’s obviously true for anyone with two eyes

They just have to go to any large corporate campus and take a good look. I know of a particular one in TX where 90% of the IT employees are of one particular nationality and at least 90 % of that group do not have any kind of permanent status in the USA. I am not talking about 100-200 employees, I'm talking about 1000 plus.

If you want to come here and be racist, stop being a coward and say it with your whole chest instead of hiding behind “one particular nationality”

That's a wild claim. 1000 non-status immigrant IT employees at one Texas company? Name it, it'll be global headlines if true.

> permanent status

Eg, green card

Clearly a lot of people benefit from this situation, which is why you can’t speak about it publicly

Always the weak blame the immigrants and then vote for the robber barons against their own interests.

There is nothing "weak" about standing up for your own economic interests. The H1B program has largely been based on a fiction--using a handful of superstars as marketing cover for tens of thousands of mid-skill developers. But with AI now coming for everyone's job the pretext of a "skills shortage" is unsustainable.

Mid-skill developers? It's now become common to just contract out dev work to folks in Eastern Europe, for example. There are exceptional people there. And it's now really hard to get them to the U.S. so instead of having them pay taxes in the U.S. and spend their wages in the U.S. and maybe found their own startups and thereby grow the U.S. economy, they just do all that in their home country.

All that immigrant hate is so short sighted, it's hard to believe that you think that's actually in your own interest. Both common sense and history disagree with you.

(Though I admit that xenophobia has evolved in ancient human societies for good reasons. No reason to not realize it's bad though, not just morally but economically too. Very suitable for populism though, clearly.)

Immigration implicates economic and cultural issues, trying to reframe them as being about "hate" or "fear" is misdirection. When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.

Similarly, dismissing the concerns as "short sighted" is just ignorant of history. Plato was thinking about the challenges of reconciling immigration with democracy 2,000 years ago. Alexander Hamilton presaged the destabilizing effects of immigration on democracy at the inception of the U.S. https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2016/12/21/hamiltons-actual-vie...

> When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.

Indeed, that is a problem. The fraction of such folks is rather small though, if you take an honest look at the statistics. It's quite rare to actually see this, apart from videos at politically leaning talk shows or youtube or a rally of certain folks. At least in a menacing way -- nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?

It needs adressing nevertheless, I'm with you there. Helping immigrants to integrate better rather than just dumping them into ghettos would be an idea. But it's rather unpopular especially in affluent neighborhoods to let little blond caucasian princess share school with the dark skinned kid whose parents have a strong accent and don't celebrate christmas. Integration sure, but not at the expense of my precious darling!!!1

> nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?

A member of my wife's family is Swedish American. Her Swedish identity is superficial, a historical curiosity. Swedish Americans aren't glued together in any meaningful way by a common identity, they don't seek each other out to live near each other. Nor can you influence them by appealing to their Swedish heritage. By contrast, I have on multiple occasions gotten comped meals from hotel workers based on being Bangladeshi. Bangladeshis in the US and Canada feel real affinity for each other--they live in Bangladeshi neighborhoods, marry within their communities, etc. And you can influence them by appealing to their shared identity.

Irish identity is largely superficial today, but for a century it wasn't. They lived in Irish enclaves, they did favors for each other based on shared identity, and they organized politically based on ethnic background, not ideology or issues. And that had real social and political consequences for the country for a long time.

Indeed, Americans underestimate how different Irish and Swedish Americans really are from Anglo Americans even today. Americans descended from different European countries remain quite different in fundamental attitudes (e.g. social trust, views towards saving, etc). And they still vote quite differently as a result. It's also obvious just going around America. As a foreigner, it's blatantly obvious which parts of the country was settled by Italians, Scandinavians, Germans, different kinds of British, etc.

I think this is largely a function of when those waves of immigration happened, and how long ago it was. In another hundred years we'll see the Bangladeshi-American descendants having a fully superficial, historical curiosity type of connection to their heritage, like you describe for the Swedish-Americans. It just takes a few generations.

Studies show that 50% of the variation between cultural attitudes in European countries is still present in descendants of those people in the U.S. If you look at which communities have the highest levels of social trust, conservative attitudes towards spending and saving, etc., it’s exactly the places you’d expect based on where those same attitudes are prevalent in Europe. And obviously we’re starting from a much larger cultural delta with Bangladeshis to begin with.

But even putting that aside, there was a lot of pain for “generations” when we had Irish and Italian enclaves and the ethnic political machines they created. So we put up with that burden for 50-100 years and for what? To get, in the best case, a Bangladeshi version of the Jersey Shore?

I don't think that's what's happening here. It's pretty clear importing thousands (10s of thousands?) people into an area has an effect on the local residents that's not good.

These aren't immigrants.

I think that's their point - the subjects of the article should be working instead of hiking. But someone with an H1B visa, yet lacking any special skills, has a job instead of them.

I don't agree with their premise, just restating it.

americans are not supposed to work, they are supposed to join the military and free up space

No problem, the American military will now have a job to invade other countries for its new colonies. I support going back to colonialism. This time it will not be the British East India Tea Company. Can we call it American East India Tea Company?

> at the cost of the American worker/Graduate

The old myth of "immigrants are taking our jobs". The American economy (and all western countries) would be substantially weaker without all those immigrants, highly skilled or not. Without them, the agricultural sector would collapse, the health care system would barely hang by a thread, and next time you go use a toilet at your companies office or a random shopping mall, try to find out who cleans it regularly (hint: that person is most certainly not born in your country nor highly educated).

Immigrants grow the economy, if anything. They make your life better.

That I even have to read this nonsense in a place with so smart and highly educated people as HN makes me pretty sad.

>who cleans it regularly (hint: that person is most certainly not born in your country nor highly educated).

If there was no immigrant willing to do it for a bare minimum wage, the mall would have to pay a local more to keep it clean. If there was no immigrant to work on farms for the bare minimum, farmers would have to pay locals a decent wage to make them do the same work. There's no such thing as a worker shortage, only wages that are too low to attract workers.

Employers have tried this and there is no possible wage that satisfies the supply/demand curve and doesn't use immigrant labor for some jobs. Not sure about cleaning mall bathrooms, but this has already been demonstrated for many crops: strawberries will rot in fields rather than American-born workers picking them, for any price.

That price is apparently $500,000 for 7% of Synphony to make robots to do that.

When the "economy" grows, that doesn't make my life better. My life gets better when I can command a higher salary for my labor, something I can't do when companies are allowed to flood the market with low cost foreign labor. This is so obvious I don't understand how supporters can be so smug and wrong at the same time.

Is the pie so fixed?

How many "regular" positions would be lost in a counterfactual world with less domestic demand?

First of all, that's not the problem. AI companies are eating up so much of the economy and supply chain that your game console -- whatever it is -- now costs another $200. Crypto at least kept this limited to GPUs. They're also openly advertising on billboards that say things like "AI won't ask for a raise."

Second -- as much as abuse of this program does happen, the problem is that they aren't decent wages or working conditions.

The only requirements of this program are that you're not paying less to a local employee -- which functionally means you can pay the same substandard wages to everyone, and then go to the government saying "we can't find qualified talent in our area." Much like a minimum wage employer with a "NO ONE WANTS TO WORK" sign, at a certain point it's actually that no one wants to work for you... but we don't put strong enough requirements in place for it to function more effectively as a way of filling talent shortages and less as a welfare system for the worst employers in your area.

The solution to this isn't broad crackdowns, or obviously hostile nonsense like that $100k fee. It's actually better labor protections -- longer grace periods so that you can leave an abusive employer, market rate pay, reasonable limits on overtime, and more scrutiny around other violations of stateside labor protections. The problem isn't that specialized fields like tech still need visas to some extent, to attract talent at their hiring bar. It's that there's no validation that these are reasonable jobs that a reasonable person would accept. It's that we shouldn't prop up companies that can't hire on their own merits, or enable large scale market manipulation to every part of our working conditions -- by giving them to companies that are 996ing, or that violate labor protections, or that openly talk about how you won't be happy there if you value pay. Those things harm everyone, and lower our labor standards across the entire industry.

The problem across both is actually the same -- businesses that want to take shortcuts to get employees (real or otherwise) that won't ask for raises, speak up about their other working conditions, or leave for something better.

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