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.

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

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

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

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

>Now, what has changed?

We did.

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

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

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.

> 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?

Hi, outsourced labourer here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then won’t cost of living in sf drop?

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

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.

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

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 ?

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_117338844.htm

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.

I did try it. Then the mortgage late notices started to pile up. Then the IRS started calling. I don't recommend 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-left-out-of-san-francisco-s-ai-boom-88510.html

> 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.

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.

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

> Funny how you dunk on surgeons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Is the pie so fixed?

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

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

What kind of CEO, CIO/CTO?

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

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/w34793.pdf

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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”.

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.