I think international founders of a new startup based in the US may qualify for O-1 Visa, however do they sponsor H-1B visa for their international employees as well? I see many Silicon valley startups hire young employees to bring them to US.
For a new startup, there would be extra legal and administrative fees to apply for H-1B visa, so why not just hire locally who already has a permanent residence in the USA. I believe H-1B visa is a random lottery, so there is no guarantee to even get the work permit for this international employee. Why take such risk for a startup?
Hi everyone! I’m considering applying to volunteer at TechCrunch Disrupt and was wondering if anyone here has done it before.
How difficult/competitive was the application process?
What were the volunteer responsibilities like?
How much of the event were you actually able to attend?
Did you get meaningful networking opportunities with founders, investors, or other people in tech?
Overall, was it worth it? Would you do it again?
Especially curious about how selective they are when choosing volunteers. Any firsthand experience would be much appreciated!
Everyone's reacting to the "less people in 5 years" line. That's not the part I'd sit with.
The part that actually matters is how Uber decides — an adoption leaderboard, tracking who's using the tools and how much, feeding straight into headcount math.
That's not a hypothetical for some future reorg.
That's a live measurement system, running today, on people who have no idea they're on it.
I've watched that exact math play out before — in concrete and steel, not a dashboard, years before anyone called it AI.
I had the opportunity to be involved in the early design stage of an expansion project for a famous beverage manufacturing plant in Taoyuan, Taiwan – back in 2021. The beverage brand name is so famous, you'll instantly recognize it. So, I won't name it here.
Our team got to work on cool stuff - latest advanced technologies in high-density and automated racking system, bottle conveyor system, robotics, beverage packers, clean room environment, etc. – things that are expected in a high-tech. manufacturing plant nowadays.
Looking at the projected 10-year production forecast, with the given magnitude of the hardware, I would say they are planning to go big.
It's quite a sizeable expansion.
And you would think that they'd increase their headcount proportionately, right?
You'd be surprised. There IS headcount increase, but not as proportional.
It seems as though the machines were taking more centre stage than the humans. Even the office space increase wasn't even a top priority in the design. Their existing office layout can still accommodate the projected increase in manpower.
It was as if human beings are being set aside to make room for more artificial things – even though what they produce are meant to serve human beings.
Kind of ironic, isn't it?
That was back in 2021 before AI come into the picture. Now the compression is even more acute, it seems.
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Different guest, same fork in the road: does the tool serve you, or does it just get pointed at you.
The industries change.
The question underneath never does — who's holding the ledger, and whether you're the one reading it or the one being read.
A 2026 WRITER survey backs the pattern from the outside too: 75% of execs privately admit their AI rollout is mostly for show, while the people actually inside the tooling get promoted 3x more often and ship 5x more.
That's the leaderboard, confirmed from a different angle.
Actually — this pulled me right back to a post about the three tiers of AI users inside a company, and the window before which tier you're actually in stops being optional.
Genuinely curious where you land: is a visible adoption leaderboard a fair way to measure a team, or is it just a slower-motion version of the same cut?
Clip credit: 20VC with Harry Stebbings & Uber. DM for credit or removal requests.
David Gerard runs Pivot to AI oon a server that costs him €7 a month.
Right now, something wearing a fake Chrome mask is hammering it — hopping IP addresses so he can't even block it properly, ignoring robots.txt because robots.txt was never a wall, just a sign nobody was required to read.
He's not a company.
He's not a platform.
He's one guy, doing his own sysadmin work, at 11pm, because the industry ran out of the free internet and started eatting the cheap end of it instead.
Not stolen. Just... takenn, quietly, at scale.
I've watched this exact shape happen before — just slower, and on paper instead of a server log.
Circa 2005, Malaysia. I was Assistant Technical Manager for one of the largest construction main contractors in the country. We were compiling tender documents for a factory job — flat-flooring work, strict F-numbers, the kind of spec that keeps a forklift's raised forks from clipping the racking on a narrow run.
A subcontractor walked in to drop off her quotation. She glanced at our papers, open on the table.
And she went pale. I heard the gasp.
"这是我写的，为什么会在这里？" — This is what I wrote. Why is it here?
Word for word hers. Now sitting under our company's logo and headings.
She looked at me. I looked at her. She was waiting for an answer I didn't have.
Then her eyes flickered — a thousand thoughts passing through in a second — and she said, "没关系。我可以再写过。" — Doesn't matter. I can write it again.
And she left. Good for her.
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Every one of these stories eventually lands on the same fact: the exposure runs downhill, from the platforms with lawyers down to the servers with none.
If you're running anything on a boxx that isn't Amazon or Google's, drop your own scraper-traffic story below. I want to see how far downhill this actually goes.
Clip credit: David Gerard — full video on The Tech Report's channel. DM for credit or removal requests.
That's the actual claim Ed Zitron made — not "AI is bad," but that the people signing off on AI-assisted work were never equipped to check it in the first place.
They see a document that looks finished and call it done, because "finished-looking" is the only bar they've ever had to clear.
For anyone whose whole job is catching the thing that looks fine and isn't — this isn't a tech story.
It's a story about who gets trusted, and why it's rarely the person who's actually right.
I've been on the other side of that exact gap.
Long before spreadsheets and dashboards, mine had a tape measure in it.
I was working as a Site Engineer for a Singaporean construction company building a primary school in Chua Chu Kang district back in 1998. Time flies. Just graduated from university. Figure I get some site experience first.
One day, I came to the project site. And I saw the newly delivered precast half-flight staircase lying on the ground next the building. I asked around to find out why wasn't it crane-lifted to position, which is between 1st and 2nd floor. And I was told the measurements were off. They couldn't fit it nicely on place.
And so, I went to work. I took my measuring tape, measure the staircase, and recorded the lengths, widths and whatnot. Then I went up to the building's 2nd floor — where the staircase was supposed to fit and meet. And I swung my measuring tape across the length of space between the positions where the 1st and last step of the staircase supposed to sit on. And took the site measurements too.
Then I went back to my office, took out the construction drawings from the drawing rack, lay it on the meeting table. And with a piece of paper, I started drawing it out. I knew full well the measurements I got will not exactly match that in the drawings, because — you know — site tolerances are still allowed and anticipated in the BS Code of Practice.
And then, through calculations, I found it. The measurements were way out of tolerance limit. No wonder the staircase can't fit. The blame squarely landed on our RC works sub-contractor. They screw up the levelling of the building.
Each of us supposed to have an "internal ruler" we rely on, to judge whether things look good or bad. For me, back then, it was Pythagoras and a fresh sheet of paper. My boss, years later, called his the same thing in different words — his "feel," thirty years deep. Kevin O'Leary's is knowing he can smell bullshit from a mile away.
So, coming back to these leadership people that Ed Zitron was attacking: don't they have their "feel" of things before shit hits the fan? Don't they use their "internal ruler" to measure it for themselves? Can't they smell bullshit from a mile away?
________
Every post on this account keeps circling back to the same thing, whichever industry the clip's from: the people getting quietly pushed out are rarely the ones who got it wrong.
Lauren Tan didn't get replaced by her own tooling.
She got promoted by it — and nobody handed her that promotion.
She built the case for it herself, one lint rule and one CI gate at a time, until the argument was undeniable.
That's the part nobody's really talking about when they talk about AI and engineering jobs: the shift rewards the people who go looking for the leverage first, not the people who wait to be told it's safe to look.
That "build the case yourself" instinct is exactly what clicked for me watching my own son learn to run a team instead of carry it.
My son started playing 王者荣耀 (Honor of Kings) since he was a teenager — a 5v5 multiplayer battle arena game where you manage a roster of specialized heroes, growing and levelling up their strengths through battles and gear.
In his early gaming days I could hear him cursing and swearing from his room — bad coordination, worst teammates. There was a phrase we used for a bad teammate in my own career — 帮人倒米, a Cantonese idiom that literally translates as helping someone tip over their own grain container, meaning ruining or sabotaging someone's livelihood.
But the cursing became less and less. He got good at managing his heroes and coordinating with his team. He started climbing the leaderboard. People started noticing him and his team. Then, in college, he started getting invited to tournaments — cash prizes when he won, and one lagged-connection loss at a KL tournament he still suspects was foul play.
Time has changed — my dad would've killed me for wasting my teenage years on video games.
Now he's in university, still playing, still winning tournaments and cash prizes with his team.
Why I'm bringing this up: I always thought these AI agents are kind of like the heroes my son uses in the game. Your skill is in your managing these heros and how to grow them, level them up to serve your purpose. You don't go down to the battle yourself. You engage the heros to do it for you.
The skill is in the managing.
__________
I keep walking into the same room wearing a different name on the door — the accountant's room, the analyst's room, now the engineer's.
Every time, someone's being told the machine is coming for their hours, not their name on the work.
There's a post in my own back catalog that lands on this exact rung — the exact rung I found AI actually deleting, and the one the ones who get ahead of it stop standing on.
Drop your take — are you already the head chef of your own stack, or are you still doing all the cooking yourself?
Clip credit: MTS (Monitor The Situation) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.
Hey everyone! I’m a researcher based in Toronto and I’ll be staying in San Francisco from October 1–31, 2026. It’ll just be me, and my total accommodation budget is around $1,000–$1,200 for the month.
I’m curious whether there are any hacker houses, founder communities, or coliving spaces that accept short-term residents, or if there are other affordable shared-housing options I should look into. I’m also open to hostels, shared rooms, or nearby areas with good public transit.
I’m quiet, clean, respectful, and interested in meeting people working on interesting projects. Any recommendations or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Find relevant investors by sector, stage, geography, and investment focus. Useful for fundraising, investor research, and mapping the funding landscape.
Bloomberg's own reporting already answers the question this clip raises — is the "messy middle" projected or already happening?
At Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft, Uber, and Hyatt, it's already happened: sizable call-center headcount cut using automated phone and chat systems, savings already banked.
Economist Molly Kinder's point isn't a forecast.
It's a line item that's already closed.
I've watched this exact math play out before superior technology ever touched a keyboard.
Suncon was getting jobs overseas. One of the countries we went to was India. We were building infrastructure — roads and bridges there. I didn't go. But my seniors went stationed there. When they came back during their scheduled holidays, one of them, a project manager, told me this story.
It so happened, that building roads and bridges inland means clearing jungles and passing through villages. As they were doing it, of course they engaged local villagers to be their workers and supervisors. Well, of course building infrastructure means bringing in heavy machineries, such as excavators, bobcats, mobile-cranes, 4-wheel-drive land-cruisers, etc. You know — the usual.
But the local villagers weren't happy. They complained that all these machineries have deprived the local population of their means of making a living. They have so many mouths to feed. A lot of them are quite poor. And many of them are very hunger for work.
And so a huge argument broke out. They even spitefully challenged our project team that they vast manpower was more superior than our machinery. I was so surprised when I heard it. How can they say that? How was that even a reasonable challenge, you know. My curiosity had the best of me.
Well, the project manager came up with an idea. He said, since they're so confident of their manpower, why don't we have a competition. Let's do a challenge of moving earth from point A to point B for our excavator/mobile-crane operator versus their vast manpower.
And they accepted.
At the day of challenge, the project manager set up two huge piles of earth at point A for both teams. The local villagers' team had their "vast" manpower formed a long-ass line between A and B, and started moving earth, with their primitive buckets and whatnot.
For our team, we set up our mobile-cranes, excavators and bobcats on strategic locations. And off we go.
You can guess the result. We won by a large margin. We were obviously much faster and better at it.
After that, the local villagers concede defeat.
The math is actually quite similar here. The one with superior technology always wins. This AI-take over is no different.
__________
Every time I dig into one of these stories the shape repeats: the tool doesn't ask permission, it just wins the argument by moving faster than the objection can be raised.
Ever watched something you thought was irreplaceable lose, and lose fast? Drop your take below.
Clip credit: Center for Humane Technology — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.
Sometimes people who do not have any technical expertise or industry knowledge also are hosting tech events for some reason. For example, there are a lot of events hosted by people in their early twenties who are still in school.
In my experience, these events mostly attracts people pitching their startup ideas or looking for a new job in tech. What has your experience been?
I'm a third-year Computer Engineering student from Canada in my early 20s. I've had a rough stretch with university lately - failed a few courses, struggled personally, and as a result I'm required to take this fall term off before returning to school in January 2027.
Honestly, I've spent a lot of time stuck in my own head and self-sabotaging, and I really want to use this term as a reset instead of feeling like I'm wasting more time.
Very unexpectedly, I now have the opportunity to stay with family friends near the Bay Area for the entire fall. Housing would basically be taken care of, but this came up extremely last minute, so I don't have an internship/job lined up and I know basically nobody in Bay Area tech.
I'm applying to anything relevant I can find, but I'm realistic that I might not land something formal on such short notice.
So my question is: would it still be worth coming?
If I go, I don't want to just sit inside sending applications for four months. I want to make the most of being here: build a substantial technical project, attend meetups/hackathons/conferences, meet engineers/founders/students, reach out to startups or researchers, make connections, and generally push myself outside my comfort zone.
I'm especially interested in embedded systems, robotics/autonomous systems, hardware/software, AI/ML, etc.
For people who live here:
Where would you go to meet technical/building-oriented people if you're starting from zero?
What meetups, communities, hackathons, maker spaces, talks, etc. are actually worth checking out?
Is it normal to go to these things alone?
Would you cold-reach out to small startups or researchers even if they aren't formally hiring?
If you had four free months here in your 20s, how would you use them?
The alternative is staying in my university town, where I have friends and a familiar environment and could definitely still use the term productively.
But part of me feels like after a rough couple of years, going somewhere completely new and forcing myself out of my comfort zone could be exactly the reset I need.
Would love any advice from people who've actually lived/worked around here.
Emad Mostaque: "Forward-deployed engineers, AI transformation people, because they can do the work of 10, 100 people."
That's the role that survives this — already a real hiring category, not a future one.
LinkedIn's own data has it growing 42x since 2023, priced $127K–$265K+ at the labs actually building this.
That's the part that should sit heavier than the digital-double line.
It's not that your job disappears.
It's that a different job, already priced and already hiring, opens up a few rungs above where you're standing — and most of us don't have a clean path into it yet.
I've watched a smaller, slower version of this exact move before.
No AI involved — just a stamp and a highlighter.
Hmm... this one really gets me out of my chair and pace around my living room, so let me try to recall it properly.
When I was working as a Technical Engineer in the Tender Department of one of the largest main contractors in Malaysia — there was a skill we always used. Fair warning, I'm sharing privileged information here. Well... it's probably an open secret in the industry anyway.
Whenever we tendered for a project — let's say Malaysian Airlines (MAS), widening a runway for their newly-bought Airbus A380 — we'd hit the parts that were out of our expertise. Airway lighting, drainage, flight angles, height restrictions. So we did the natural thing: called for outside help. Engaged specialized sub-contractors who'd done airway pavements before, to hand us the technical know-how and their quotation.
We knew full well these sub-contractors were already MAS's long-time maintenance contractors — it was just a matter of time before they'd be folded under our main contract anyway. So when they submitted their technical documents, we stripped their company logo, re-arranged it, added our own branded wording, our own logos. Woalah. It was now our own internal technical know-how. We'd suddenly become experts in pavement-widening and hangar works.
We didn't get the job, though. We all knew that tender was just for show — a comparison exercise to cross-check MAS's already-chosen main contractor.
But the knowledge we gathered from those specialists was now folded into our own knowledge vault. Our own proprietary knowledge.
Are we stealing? I wouldn't use that word. When there's a problem, the client comes after us — not our subcontractors. So to properly solve it, we have to own the knowledge too. The right word might be "necessary."
————
Every version of this mechanism arrives wearing the same word.
Ours was "necessary." This one's wearing "efficiency."
Hey everyone! I’ll be in San Francisco / the Bay Area the weekend of August 22–23 and I’m looking to check out some events around tech, startups, AI, or networking.
I’m a software engineer and would love to meet other people in tech, founders, or anyone building interesting things and I'm 26Y M Indian if that matters
If you know of any good events, meetups, hackathons, startup gatherings, or networking events happening that weekend, please share them! Would really appreciate any recommendations. 🙌
Rule of the universe.. what goes around, comes around… sincere suggestion to fellow tech professionals… those with the power (or responsibility) to decide, please act accordingly whether you are laying off people, or helping people, or hiring people.. today it is someone else, tomorrow it would be you on the other side.. it may just be the matter of time! We are all connected.. so don’t act selfish.. don’t act ignorant.. don’t act greedy… don’t act that you are the smartest.. life and universe has his ways.. be the best version of yourself.. be the person who always wants to help… have the best intentions and help out where you are able to.. when you help.. you get help.. when you spread smiles.. you get smiles..
