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.
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
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.
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.
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 ;_;
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.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
Why pussy foot around hurting the feeling of ignorant gullible racist xenophobic sacks of shit who blame powerless immigrants instead of powerful oligarchs for their economic and unemployment problems? I thought MAGA cult members loved it when people say what they're really thinking no matter whose feelings get hurt, instead of being so politically correct. Who's the sensitive snowflake now?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
"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.
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?
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.
> 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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where’s those other highly walkable cities (by American standards) with great running weather, plentiful amazing views, and diverse restaurants and activities?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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... ?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
https://archive.ph/hTPql
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.
Sounds like if I'm smart enough and lucky enough I would have several Billions in my bank account.
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
we learn the falseness of human exceptionalism at different rates, some learn it on their death beds.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;_;
Same thing could be said of dot com era. Sure the Internet changed everything, but not every company was a winner, quite the contrary.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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?
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
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
>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.
But that's just good management. You can't have your organization struggle because someone gets hit by a bus or quits suddenly.
> 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.
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.
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.
Fungibility is tangential to the sort of culture shift I'm talking about.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
>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
Give them some credit, they can be both
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".
Why pussy foot around hurting the feeling of ignorant gullible racist xenophobic sacks of shit who blame powerless immigrants instead of powerful oligarchs for their economic and unemployment problems? I thought MAGA cult members loved it when people say what they're really thinking no matter whose feelings get hurt, instead of being so politically correct. Who's the sensitive snowflake now?
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.
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.
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 ?
> 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?
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...
"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
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?
My point still stands.
if they brought tents they might be scouting their new neighborhood
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.
If the pay is the same I fully agree. But it is not.
Imagine not thinking about "pay" 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 did try it. Then the mortgage late notices started to pile up. Then the IRS started calling. I don't recommend it.
Imagine not thinking about “food” and “shelter” all the time. Try it.
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.
Syndicated at https://www.fa-mag.com/news/jobless-tech-workers-are-being-l...
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> highly walkable, diverse activities
I don't think Bellevue fits the bill here, but certain Seattle neighborhoods do.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like they just enjoy the early retirement.
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... ?
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.
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.
Nurses have strong unions that this year made big gains for their members. Why would this change ?
> 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.
and that people still have money to spend
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Offshored workers don't compete with me for food, housing, education, etc.
You're competing with 2 billion Asians. We're never going back to the 1950s no matter now much people cry about it.
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...
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.
Is the pie so fixed?
How many "regular" positions would be lost in a counterfactual world with less domestic demand?
americans are not supposed to work, they are supposed to join the military and free up space
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.
Clearly a lot of people benefit from this situation, which is why you can’t speak about it publicly
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
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”
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?
"Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!"
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Trump already charges $100K in taxes for each. Is this not enough?
That ended up not happening.
I liked the idea (even as a former h1b holder) but it seems tied up in court and nobody is paying it yet
Clearly not