At a certain level promotion is not about just doing something well. Funnily enough, his plans now are to go do other things (presumably well) without a particular sense of direction and hope that it works out.
Wonderful to see people reinventing taxation from the first principles: "awesome country to live in, with great education and social security, but these are expensive countries, from a Tax perspective"
It's not appropriate to use the word "confiscate" in this context. If you're not satisfied with the social contract of this country, you're free to leave and earn money elsewhere.
Perhaps an interesting way to interpret what you're saying is that SF is bad enough that people no longer want to move there since all their surplus income will be consumed by housing costs (valid concern!).
But new immigrant salaries are as good as american salaries in terms of how much they can push prices up; so hiring H1-B is essentially similar to a pay cut for people (same $$, higher housing costs); following this pay cut some existing engineers will leave.
In the end you just end up with replacing some old engineers with new ones through a costly lengthy process.
This is the kind of absurd logical games one has to play in order to not acknowledge basic economics of supply and demand.
At a certain level promotion is not about just doing something well. Funnily enough, his plans now are to go do other things (presumably well) without a particular sense of direction and hope that it works out.