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Key Takeaways In December, former Google employee Basem Istanbouli created un(PTO), a community for people in the San Francisco area trying to navigate life between jobs.
The community now has more than 1,700 members, some of whom get together for weekly hikes.
For workers, the AI shift is changing the skills that employers want and causing roles like forward-deployed engineers to gain traction.
On a Monday morning this month, more than 50 laid-off tech workers met for a hike on Mount Tamalpais, the towering peak that looks out over San Francisco Bay. They made their way down the quiet trail in small groups, following Basem Istanbouli, a former Google employee.
The hikers were all figuring out what comes next, Bloomberg recently reported. One former Meta employee was thinking about walking away from tech to focus on illustration. Another, a software engineer who had been unemployed for over a year, carried a large camera he had bought just days before losing his job.
As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public, their employees expect to get rich. However, not every tech worker in San Francisco works for an AI startup. Many are unemployed and looking for work, illustrating the other side of the AI boom.
Since December, Istanbouli has been bringing unemployed workers together for weekly hikes through un(PTO), a community he created for people trying to navigate life between jobs. What began with just three people, including himself, a friend and someone he met through Reddit, has grown into an online group of more than 1,700 members. Some of its outings now draw more than 80 people.
Falling demand for software engineers
Bay Area tech companies notified more than 14,500 workers of layoffs in the year ending in June, nearly twice as many as the previous fiscal year, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of California employment data.
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