Layoffs across the industry have surged, and for a city that essentially rebuilt its identity around hoodies-and-equity compensation packages, the fallout is impossible to ignore. Restaurants in SoMa are quieter. Luxury apartment vacancies are ticking up. And the once-unshakable confidence of the Bay Area tech worker — the person who could quit on Friday and have three offers by Monday — is gone.

Let's be honest about what's happening here. For years, major tech companies operated like money was an infinite resource. Headcount ballooned during the pandemic hiring frenzy, with firms competing to snap up talent they didn't always need. Interest rates were near zero, growth-at-all-costs was the mantra, and nobody in the C-suite seemed particularly worried about building a sustainable business. Now the bill is due.

And who's paying it? Not the executives who approved the hiring binges. Not the boards who rubber-stamped bloated budgets. It's the mid-level engineer, the project manager, the designer who uprooted their life to move to one of the most expensive cities on Earth. As one Bay Area resident put it with the kind of gallows humor only this situation produces: "But have you thought of the shareholders?"

Here's the thing fiscal conservatives have been saying for years, and it applies to corporations just as much as governments: unsustainable spending always ends in painful corrections. The companies that treated headcount like a vanity metric are now treating layoffs like a quick fix to appease Wall Street. Neither approach is serious management.

San Francisco should be paying close attention. The city's budget is grotesquely dependent on tech-sector tax revenue. Every laid-off worker is a potential resident who leaves, taking their spending — and their tax dollars — with them. City Hall has done precious little to diversify the local economy or rein in its own spending to prepare for exactly this kind of downturn.

The tech industry will recover. It always does. But SF's leaders need to stop assuming the golden goose will keep laying forever and start planning like adults. The workers who built this city's modern economy deserve better — from their employers and their government.