Let that sink in. In the first quarter alone, roughly 81,700 tech and startup employees were shown the door, the highest quarterly figure since early 2023. Another 20,000 followed in the first six weeks of Q2. At this pace, 2026 is on track to rival — or surpass — the mass culling of 2023, when over 160,000 workers were cut in Q1 alone.

What's driving it? Two words: artificial intelligence. Companies are dumping headcount to funnel cash into AI investment, betting that algorithms can replace the people who used to build and maintain their products. It's a sharp reversal from 2025, when quarterly layoffs hovered in the relatively tame range of 27,000 to 37,000. The current trajectory suggests we're entering another full-blown restructuring cycle.

For San Francisco, the implications are enormous — but maybe not in the way the loudest voices on social media suggest. As one Bay Area resident pointed out, "60% of the people living in the area are not part of the tech boom. Teachers, nurses, restaurant workers... Who will be left to even cut your hair or sell you food?" That's the real story. When tech contracts, it doesn't just hurt engineers pulling $300K. It ripples through every coffee shop, every landlord's rent roll, every city tax receipt.

And yet, let's be honest about the other side. As one local put it bluntly: "People making $500K and feeling depressed need to go touch grass." Fair. The sympathy well runs dry when the loudest mourners are still sitting on seven-figure net worths.

The fiscal reality for SF, though, is no joke. This city built its budget on the assumption that tech money would keep flowing forever — stock-based compensation taxes, commercial lease revenue, the whole house of cards. Every wave of layoffs is a stress test on a city government that has never met a dollar it couldn't spend.

One Bay Area engineer captured the mood with brutal honesty: "I feel no future at the moment. I swear if things go south, I will try to land a job in sanitation."

Here's our unsolicited advice to City Hall: maybe stop treating tech windfalls as permanent revenue and start building a budget that can survive the downturns. Because this one's far from over.