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.
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.
I dont remember the details, but its not safe to assume that the first 6m have no employee-shares being sold.
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
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?
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
>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.
Everyone should just be a small cog in a big machine.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Internal turf wars, endless meetings to get “alignment” and pivoting on management’s latest whims are what slows feature delivery.
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.
Because the amount of skill it takes to do that is not commensurate with a salary high enough to afford living in SF.
Companies have decided now that a mediocre employee with Claude is now good enough, especially at the offshore price point.
What does highly skilled even mean nowadays / with Claude Code?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
How much of this is just everything IT-related being rebranded as AI?
I'd rather hike than sling JavaScript for a bunch of finance goofs, but that's just me.
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?
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.
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.
Everything else is just an inflated title to make the company seem AI forward.
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 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.
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.
I’ve apparently been overlooking all of them!
If not, Seattle/Bellevue are a great option. Or Portland even.
I don't think Bellevue fits the bill here, but certain Seattle neighborhoods do.
Portland I’ll admit haven’t explored well, so not going to give a judgement.
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.
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?
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.
More traffic, fewer families, faster pace of life, etc.
The Bay Area has its pros and cons.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(I don't love this analogy and consider it extreme and not overly accurate)
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.)
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 agree with their premise, just restating it.
How many "regular" positions would be lost in a counterfactual world with less domestic demand?
Eg, green card
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.
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.
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.
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.