SF vibes are frenetic over the huge divide in outcomes and career uncertainty for software engineers; over 5 years ~10K people in AI attained retirement wealth
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen. Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope
@deedydasDeedy
Context & Ripple Effects
Related coverage traces a widening AI labor premium: senior engineers specializing in AI/ML were already reported to earn more than peers, while the AI boom has revived San Francisco foot traffic and commercial leasing.
That recovery has not been broadly shared. Later coverage describes tech workers facing a new AI elite and difficulty remaining in the city, alongside rent pressure tied to AI-company hiring and housing support.
First-order effects
The reported concentration of AI equity gains among employees and founders at companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia and Meta sharpens the financial gap between workers attached to leading AI platforms and the broader software-engineering market.
For San Francisco engineers, career choices increasingly hinge on access to a small set of frontier-AI employers or startups, raising uncertainty for workers whose skills and compensation are less directly tied to AI.
Second-order effects
Frontier-AI companies face stronger competition for scarce technical talent, likely reinforcing specialized pay, equity packages and recruiting advantages over companies outside that group.
The local benefits of AI expansion—office demand, spending and housing demand—can coexist with greater affordability pressure for workers who do not participate in the equity upside.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, AI could make technology-sector wealth creation more concentrated around a narrow set of model builders, chip suppliers and founders rather than broadly distributed across software roles.
The resulting divide may reshape San Francisco's labor market into a higher-paid frontier-AI tier and a larger group exposed to automation, slower wage growth, or displacement; the scale and durability of that split remain uncertain.
The trend: This is one data point in AI's shift from a broad software hiring cycle toward a more concentrated economy of frontier-model, infrastructure and equity winners.
I had my FOMO phase too: “If I hadn't started a company a few years ago and had joined OpenAI/Anthropic/xAI instead, I'd probably have $100M now.” But then I watched some of those rich people. Their daily focus became: “How do I minimize taxes?” “Where should I buy a house in
>Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Never get where, though? Many of the people in this industry believe takeoff is imminent or already underway. Do these numbers matter in the world
When my wife was in business school, people would occasionally refer to someone else as “first-time cool” - meaning that they had been marginalized socially before (at prior jobs, college, HS, wherever), and were reinventing themselves in a new social arena. Often by trying a
If you're stuck in the Bay Area tech rat race / psychosis, make time to travel to other places. Go to a small town in Europe or visit Asia - you'll see that life can be about much more than whether you're IC7 or IC8 or what company you work for. Don't be the person to put on
@deedydas This is what Heidegger called thrownness. you didn't choose your starting conditions, the year you graduated, whether your college roommate happened to be starting a company in 2018 or if you landed at Anthropic or OpenAI. The people outside that $20M circle aren't fail…
Fascinating that it doesn't seem to occur to these post-economic people to pass on their knowledge and experience. Teach, coach, mentor some bright kids, etc. The fact it's seen as low status, when it even gets considered, says a lot about the solipsistic culture they're in.
I can't stop thinking about this post. If you do one thing today, I encourage you to give it a thoughtful, thorough read... And then commit to never living your life this way. Life has wasted success on the people described in this post. It really is completely pathetic. They
My message to most of the people addressed in this post is you are incredibly fortunate and can simply make a choice to be happy about the position you've gotten yourself into
what's interesting to me is that the previous gold rushes didn't credibly threaten the safe path simultaneously while dangling the jackpot. like you could sit out the dot com boom & keep your accounting job. the current bit where the same technology is both the lottery ticket &
It is 70 and sunny in New York City, we're heading to a kite festival, and I haven't heard the words “agent” or “token” once all morning. Greatest city in the world.
Would you rather make money slowly or make it all at once? My entrepreneur friends and I noticed some differences: - People who make a lot of money all at once (e.g., sell their company) often still feel scarcity about money after the transaction. Hard to change their