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
This account sits alongside coverage of an AI-led revival in San Francisco, including increased commercial activity, while earlier reporting warned that generative-AI startups could add comparatively few jobs even as they automate work.
Related coverage also records a pay premium for AI/ML-specialized senior engineers and later pressure on San Francisco housing costs tied to AI employers. That makes the reported wealth concentration relevant not only to startup upside, but to the broader local labor and cost-of-living divide.
First-order effects
The reported concentration of retirement-scale wealth among a small group of AI-company employees and founders sharpens the perceived gap between workers with equity exposure to leading AI firms and the wider software-engineering workforce.
Career uncertainty becomes more acute for engineers outside the AI winners: the story frames outcomes as increasingly dependent on access to a narrow set of companies and roles, rather than a broad-based tech hiring cycle.
Second-order effects
AI/ML specialization is likely to command still greater attention in recruiting and career decisions, reinforcing the compensation premium already reported for senior engineers in those fields.
As highly compensated AI workers cluster in San Francisco, the benefits of the boom can collide with housing and local-cost pressures, making it harder for six-figure workers without comparable equity gains to remain in the city.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, San Francisco tech could become more bifurcated: a small set of frontier-AI firms captures outsized equity value while a larger pool of engineers faces weaker bargaining power and less predictable career paths.
The key uncertainty is whether AI expansion broadens into job creation across the ecosystem or continues to concentrate gains in capital-intensive frontier companies; the related coverage supports evidence for both local activity and limited-job concerns.
The trend: This is one data point in AI’s shift from a broad software-industry growth narrative toward a frontier-model economy where equity, specialized talent, and geographic proximity concentrate the gains.
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
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
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
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
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
>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
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.
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.
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 &
@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…
The implications of this are much larger than the mutual resentments of SF strivers. The ruthless boom/bust, winner-take-all competition means the place can never have anything like a normal culture, nor appeal to anyone outside the melée. There's a reason why tech punches way
Everyone's losing their mind over this post (and even I deleted my QT riff on it; too busy trying to escape the permanent underclass for X dramas). But it's perhaps the only recent honest take on an industry (and city) that live forever encrusted in a thick carapace of