XPost: ba.politics, talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
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   From: leroysoetoro@americans-first.com   
      
   https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/28/ai-booming-tech-jobs-san-francisco/   
      
   The city lost thousands of jobs last year as layoffs at major companies   
   outpaced hiring.   
      
   Another boom time has arrived in San Francisco. Office buildings are   
   filling back up. Apartment hunters are locked in bidding wars. And   
   lunchtime lines snake around the block for overpriced slop bowls. But   
   despite San Francisco being the undisputed center of the AI boom, the city   
   is hemorrhaging thousands of tech jobs.   
      
   The labor market of San Francisco and San Mateo counties saw the loss of   
   4,400 jobs, or 0.4%, in 2025, according to data released last week by the   
   California Employment Development Department. A decline in tech jobs was a   
   big driver, with the information sector recording the steepest annual   
   drop, losing 4,500 jobs, about 4%.   
      
   The downturn has spilled into adjacent industries. Professional and   
   business services posted a net decline of 3,600 jobs over the year, with   
   sharp reductions in professional, scientific, and technical services and   
   in corporate management roles. Those losses were partially offset by   
   modest gains in administrative and support services.   
      
   Leisure and hospitality led job growth, adding 4,500 positions over the   
   year. Nearly 80% of those gains came from accommodation and food services,   
   reflecting a rebound of in-person activity even as high-paying office jobs   
   wane.   
      
   In San Francisco proper, the slowdown was more severe than in any other   
   major city. The number of job listings in San Francisco declined 37% from   
   February 2020 to October 2025, according to data from Indeed(opens in new   
   tab).   
      
   “The number of jobs being created in AI is not enough to fully offset the   
   job losses at traditional Big Tech companies,” said Enrico Moretti, a   
   professor of economics at UC Berkeley. “The upward trend in AI is still   
   dwarfed by the downward trend from the rest of the industry.” In 2025,   
   around 40,000 workers were laid off at tech companies headquartered in the   
   Bay Area, according to independent tracker Layoffs.fyi(opens in new tab).   
   Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic employ fewer than 10,000 employees   
   combined.   
      
   The layoffs have continued into this year. Menlo Park-based Meta cut more   
   than 1,000 jobs(opens in new tab) from its Reality Labs division this   
   month, while San Francisco-based Pinterest said this week that it’s laying   
   off 15% of its workforce(opens in new tab) and cutting back on office   
   space.   
      
   San Francisco’s labor market is a national outlier because of its heavy   
   exposure to tech. Nationally, economists describe the current labor market   
   as “low hire, low fire,” but in the tech sector, it is better   
   characterized as “low hire, some fire,” according to Laura Ullrich,   
   director of economic research at Indeed.   
      
   The pullback follows more than a decade of rapid expansion of the city’s   
   tech sector. Starting in the mid-2010s, low interest rates and abundant   
   venture capital fueled investment into local private tech companies,   
   driven by the hope of lucrative initial public offerings. Flush with cash,   
   companies expanded aggressively, adding jobs and competing fiercely for   
   talent in a search for fast growth, blitzscale-style.   
      
   That hiring spree accelerated during the pandemic. Jobs were plentiful,   
   perks were lavish, and workers who hit a wall at one company could   
   probably land a job with the competition.   
      
   But this era of Big Tech “over-exuberance” has ended, according to   
   Moretti, as interest rates have spiked and headcounts proved too large.   
      
   Of course, the tech downturn has coincided with the rise of artificial   
   intelligence, adding a new layer of disruption to an already unsettled   
   labor market. New college graduates, in particular, are finding themselves   
   shut out of the workforce as companies favor automation and more seasoned   
   workers. Since 2019, the hiring of new graduates at the 15 largest tech   
   companies has fallen 55% nationwide, according to data from venture   
   capital firm SignalFire.   
      
   For those who are employed, companies are increasingly mandating “AI   
   fluency,” using the technology to shrink workforces and push employees to   
   do more with less.   
      
   “Companies are hiring fewer software engineers because they can use AI and   
   be more productive,” said Ullrich. “So maybe instead of having 20 people   
   on your team, you now have 10.”   
      
   More broadly, the wave of AI-driven growth looks fundamentally different   
   from past tech booms in the city. This time, much of the investment   
   capital is flowing not to jobs and office space but into the costly   
   infrastructure that underpins artificial intelligence: data centers,   
   specialized chips, and computing power. The shift has muted tech hiring   
   and reduced the spillover benefits that once rippled through the economy,   
   explaining why the region lost jobs last year even as investment surged.   
      
   “When tech is hiring, you have money flowing out of both the companies and   
   their employees,” said Ted Egan, chief economist for the city and county   
   of San Francisco. “Tech is the driving force of growth in the city.”   
      
   What declining tech hiring means for the Bay Area’s future remains   
   uncertain. Egan pointed to signs that AI adoption is beginning to stall   
   even as investment continues to pour in — a mismatch that could create   
   further short-term disruption in the labor market.   
      
   Those concerns are increasingly echoed by tech executives, some of whom   
   warn that advances in AI could trigger widespread upheaval for white-   
   collar workers. In that view, San Francisco’s pullback in tech hiring may   
   be an early signal of what other regions could face as AI continues to   
   improve.   
      
   “I think it’s possible that we see 20%-30% unemployment levels over the   
   next two to five years,” Verizon CEO Dan Schulman said last week at the   
   World Economic Forum(opens in new tab) in Davos, Switzerland. “To what   
   will you reskill? Customer service — most of that will go away.   
   Programming, we know most of that will go away. Legal probably gets cut in   
   half.”   
      
   At the same conference, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon argued for phasing   
   in automation(opens in new tab) to avoid displacement, saying he’d welcome   
   government bans on mass replacement of humans with AI, if they were   
   needed.   
      
   Similar anxieties surfaced this week in an essay(opens in new tab) by   
   Dario Amodei, CEO of San Francisco-based Anthropic, who cautioned that   
   rapid advances in AI could create an “underclass” of unemployed or very   
   low-wage workers.   
      
   Still, not everyone is pessimistic. Moretti said the AI era is still in   
   its early phase, with most AI-related jobs concentrated in basic science,   
   including research and technical development. He expects broader job   
   growth to follow as the technology is applied more widely across   
   industries and as companies move from experimentation to selling AI-   
      
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