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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!

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.

You have 4 million dollars. Be happy about that.

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

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

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.

> 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

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.

>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.

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?

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".

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.

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

Hiking doesn’t buy much food and shelter

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.

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.

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.

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!

Where though?

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

What kind of CEO, CIO/CTO?

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

> 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.

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

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.

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... ?