When the promotion ladder fails and middle management stalls, where is the path forward for traditional engineers? The cracks in wealth disparity are harder to repair than code.

AIMPACT reports that the AI wave is triggering wealth polarization and psychological rifts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the past five years, approximately 10k core employees and founders from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and NVIDIA have accumulated over $20 million in wealth, making the career prospects for traditional software engineers increasingly bleak. Four types of mindset shifts have emerged in Silicon Valley: the failure of promotion pathways, young people's career nihilism, middle management paralysis, and the lost goals of the ultra-rich. Das believes that the anxiety over the AI gold rush is tormenting industry practitioners, driving more people to develop AI products that can generate wealth.