YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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.

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

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.

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’ve apparently been overlooking all of them!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.