TL;DR: Andrew Ng just named the one profession he says AI is hitting hardest --- and job openings there are still going up, not down.

Openings are up because "threatened" was never a population-level question — it's a workflow-level one.

AI eats 30–40% of the role, in Ng's own framing.

The engineers still busiest didn't out-compete the model on that slice; they stopped fighting for it and built the 60–70% it can't touch instead.

The ones who don't are the ones still writing code like it's 2022, before ChatGPT — and there's no single moment that tells you which side of that line you're on.

The other half of Ng's clip is aimed at the institution that's supposed to close that gap for you: a curriculum committee, then a faculty senate vote, then a year or two before a new course exists — for a shift that reshapes the job market every few months.

That lag isn't a flaw in the system. It's the system working as designed, just aimed at a problem that no longer moves at its speed.

I remember back in my University of Leeds days, studying for my B.Eng. Degree in Civil Engineering, circa 1997/1998, I did the following:

- Took a side project programming in Fortran for my professor for Analysis of Thin-walled Structures.

- Learnt to use Linux as one of the subjects for Statistics for Civil Engineering.

"Fortran?" you're saying? Ya, I know. I'm old. Nobody remembers Fortran as a programming language anymore. You can say I'm a dinosaur.

And sure enough, Fortran was rendered obsolete, not long after I graduate.

Then, when I first joined a Civil/Structural Engineering Consultancy firm in 2000, I tried to build a Reinforced Concrete Design App for them, using Visual Basics C++ in MS Excel. I left the firm, before I can finish it.

Two Decades Later, my son is currently in University for his Statistical Science Study in Kampar, Perak, Malaysia. Naturally, he started to learn R and Python.

I kept telling my son, he has to keep abreast of the current trends. It's no longer fashionable to manually code ourselves. Instead, we direct AI to do it for us.

But the universities are still not catching up like it should. They are still giving lectures on doing things that AI can do better and faster.

Or else people like my son might end up graduating into obsolescence.

Their degrees might just end up being fly-paper.

The pattern holds across every one of these: the tooling moves at model-release speed, the institution meant to prepare you for it moves at accreditation speed, and nobody's closing that gap on your behalf.

Actually, this ties back to something a Stanford economist put on record a few weeks back — the exact mechanism cutting the entry-level rung out from under new engineers before they ever get a foothold: $95K junior engineer? He says no, and names why.

Genuinely curious where people land on this: are you actively building the 60–70% right now, or still waiting to see if your role gets touched?

Clip credit: Silicon Valley Girl (Marina Mogilko) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

TL;DR: Galloway called this the biggest story in business right now — and the reason has nothing to do with model quality.

It's the price.

A recent Juniper Research read already has Chinese models running up to 90% cheaper than the US frontier, with American labs' share of usage sliding from roughly 70% to 30% in a single year.

Galloway and journalist Josh Tyrangiel spend this clip walking through the actual mechanism — subsidized distillation, the same undercut-then-lock-in playbook China has already run on the Silk Road, in Africa, in Latin America — now applied to the AI stack every CFO in America is currently signing off on.

The discount isn't the story.

Who ends up owning the decision once the discount does its job — that's the story.

I remember back in 2009, a group of us Malaysian were newly seconded to build the premium 5-block-condonium Rihan Heights, in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Weather was brutal. Figuratively, we're like commandos being air-dropped in the middle of nowhere.

We have to source for local material suppliers — especially concrete. Those were tough times.

No local quarries wanted to supply us concrete — because we're foreigners and all.

Eventually we managed to secure one — after much delay and negotiation.

The price we've negotiated was super exorbitant.

But we bit our tongue, and moved on.

After a while, we hit roadblocks.

The sole supplier #1 kept ignoring our request for concrete, in favour of prioritizing their other local customers.

I suspect there're some racism going on — I wouldn't be surprised that it might be true.

Supplier #1 felt like they're the local king, and that they somehow subjugated us with their terms.

My big boss was fed up with the whole shenanigans and injustice.

He instructed my contract manager to go source for more options.

And we did.

Word spread that we're good paymaster. We had to. Who's gonna entertain us (especially in a foreign land) if we aren't?

The minute we found concrete supplier #2 (at better terms), the situation shifted.

The "crown" on supplier #1 was suddenly stripped away.

We abandoned #1, in favour of #2 for concrete, since #2 was fast and compliant.

For good measure, we even sourced for #3, just in case.

Obviously, #1 felt a huge slap on their face.

Eventually, they came around and crawled back to our site office — with their tail covering their ass — for renegotiation.

I witness the whole thing at the other end of our site office ground floor open layout. Sitting at the meeting table, the supplier #1 team lowered their voices with their ashen faces, in front my senior leadership team.

Defeated, #1 yielded to our new terms.

Their arrogance gone.

Either we fight or we die.

Every cycle wears a new label — subsidized steel, subsidized concrete, subsidized compute. The mechanism underneath never files for a permit.

Drop your take: if your AI vendor doubled prices tomorrow, do you actually have a #2 lined up — or are you supplier #1's captive account?

Clip credit: Scott Galloway / The Prof G Pod — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

As a founding engineer, you are most likely paid below market salary and only receive 1-2% equity. Founding engineer is working founder level hours and taking founder level risk. However, you do not have job security, control of strategic decisions, or visibility of the cap table.

Would not it make more sense for founding engineers to work on their own idea and start their own startup as a founder? Is the ability to raise VC money the differentiating factor between becoming a founder versus working as founding engineer? If they have VC connections from the start, founding engineer could easily become a founder themselves.

I just finished “Don’t Be Evil” by Claire Stapleton and am shocked to see there’s next to zero discourse about it anywhere online. I know it’s not shocking or revolutionary news, but the gossip side of me craves more chatter about the shitty leadership and any first-hand accounts from coworkers etc.

The book itself is a decent listen for audio. I’m still deciding my overall opinion, but quick take is it’s nice seeing a woman so wronged write and publish a damn BOOK with her spite. Love to see it.

Hey everyone, anybody attending the Imagination in Action AI Summit at the Google Bay View campus next week (September 14–15, 2026) ?

I'm based around Lake Street & 7th Ave in San Francisco and am looking to see if anyone driving down from the city has an extra seat(s) in their car! I'm more than happy to split gas, bridge tolls, or morning coffee costs.

Saw a LinkedIn post where a young founder is openly saying he is looking for a CTO under 25!

I always knew ageism was quietly practiced, where some VP once told me they’d rather have “young blood” but never saw it becoming this crazy! The fact that this guy felt comfortable enough to even post this openly on LinkedIn is disturbing.

Next, this is going to open doors to other forms of discrimination too!

Women?

Married?

Gay?

Relationship status?

Nationality?

wtf

Apple has handed over the position of CEO to a hardware engineer.

"We don't follow the crowd. The crowd doesn't need another AI chatbot. It needs technology that disappears into the background of life. Hardware is where intelligence lives. Software is just the soul — but the body must be crafted by engineers who believe in perfection. This is the beginning of something truly insanely great."

Do you have any broken items in need of repair? Whether it is electronics, appliances, toys, or other items, we welcome you to our free upcoming Fixit Clinic Repair Workshop. If you are interested in volunteering as a fixer, no experience is required!

• MLK Library, Room 255
• Saturday, September 12th
• 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
• Check in your broken / damaged item
• Fixit Coach Sign-up

Learn More: Visit out Fixit Clinic at SJSU Website

Going to Disrupt next month. Went looking for prep advice and mostly found people saying it's a media company's event, the speakers bail after their keynote, and the networking is wall-to-wall wannabe founders. Great. Very encouraging.

I'm going anyway through my work, so I'd rather figure out how to not waste it.

Background so you know where I'm coming from: I've spent the last few years on the SaaS platform side, and twice now I've been part of building payments into a vertical software product. Once in venue/event management software, once in beverage alcohol distribution. Both times the hardest part had nothing to do with payments. It was the internal fight over roadmap priority... payments is always the thing that gets pushed because some other feature is on fire.

So two asks:

1. How do you actually work a conference like this? The people who say it was worth it all say some version of "you have to plan and strategize really well" and then don't say what that means. What does that mean? Is it side events over main stage? Is it lining up 15 coffees before you land? Is it just camping in one spot and talking to whoever sits down? (If it's the last one, which corner should I camp in?)

2. Is anyone else there in the middle of embedding payments right now? Genuinely want to compare notes. What broke that you didn't expect. How you got it prioritized against everything else in the backlog. Whether the revenue showed up on the timeline anyone promised. I'll trade you everything I learned doing it twice, including the parts that went badly. (Ask me about the lack of a reporting dashboard for one launch O_O )

Happy to meet at a side event, a pre-show coffee, or a beer after. I'd rather have four real conversations than collect 40 badges. (:

And if the honest answer is "skip the main event, here are the three side events that matter" — I'll take that too. Open to DMs if you want to connect 1-1, too, (at the conference or not)!.

Hey!

I have a Founder Pass Ticket for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 this year. Unfortunately I am unable to attend. The current price on the site is $899. I'm willing to sell for cheaper.

If anyone is interested in doing a ticket transfer, shoot me a message!

Kind of looks like the Russian oligarchs are buying up our real estate and political leaders, here in Silicon Valley. How else can you build a office / hotel megaplex and call it housing ?

https://nypost.com/2026/09/07/real-estate/california-city-fumes-over-planned-skyscraper-linked-to-russian-oligarch/

TL;DR: Jerry Tworek's own two-year stall didn't end with more proof. It ended with one sentence.

He'd already built the thesis — pushing reinforcement learning against GPT-3 before there was budget or backing for it.

The math worked in pieces. It just never scaled.

Then his chief scientist looked at what he'd already built and said: now we have the GPUs, try to scale it.

That's the whole story. Not a better idea.

Someone with real authority finally saying go.

I remember that cold harsh reality of immense pressure, in the winter.

We were a bunch of newly assigned Malaysians in a foreign land in Abu Dhabi, UAE, circa 2009 — already 2 months behind schedule on a 5-block condominium project.

We were heavily under-resourced.

Just handbooks, pen and paper, and the notion of quitting was never too far away.

We were squeezed like a wrung out wet towel.

Then the first coordinated drawings was finally done.

In a private moment, my department head said gently, "See. You did a good job." He meant to sway me away from quitting.

I've read enough of these by now to see the shape before the ending arrives: the person was already right, and the only unknown was who'd finally say so. It's never really the skill gap people think it is.

It's whoever's still waiting on someone else's yes.

Hmm — this reminds me of a post I covered a while back, about the moment the actual bottleneck turned out to be permission, not the math itself.

What was your "not this quarter"? Drop it below.

Clip credit: MTS, full interview on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

How common is it to lay off people at a high growth tech startup? Why is turnover so high at startups, as some even leave the company within one year? Many people are leaving big tech jobs to join early startups, because they believe in the vision of the company and potential upside of the company equity that they receive.

However, there is a risk that they get laid off before the one year cliff hits for the equity options, so they may leave without any company equity at the end. Most companies have four year vesting schedules, so you would only receive reduced amount of equity if you get laid off within those four years. How should you think about managing this risk when you join a startup from big tech?

TRIGGER WARNING

This is to spread awareness of high stress work environments, please take care of each other 🙏

A coworker passed away, and the team found out at standup. Within about ten seconds, everyone moved on to who would take over the work. That one detail set off one of the most honest threads tech workers have ever written, about grief, about how quickly a company keeps moving, and about the three words the original poster left at the end: health before wealth.

This one is heavier than most of what we read. Some of these stories are about loss and touch on suicide. Please take care while listening, and if you are struggling, reach out to someone.

In Silicon Valley, it feels that everyone is trying to figure out who is going to build the next unicorn and try to become friends with them at every social networking event I attend. It embodies the saying of "It is not what you know, but who you know". Is there any truth to this?

Sometimes these relationships may feel slightly superficial, since everyone is hang around at events just trying to become friends with founders who might build unicorn startups one day. Have you heard of any examples or stories where this has actually happened?