Or how I decided to scream into the void about how awful the job market is. I'm still in a very sour mood after the latest rounds of interviews but ultimately this is my blog and a way to let off some of that sourness.
For reference: I'm a software engineer of about 10ish years of experience. I've worked for a small contractor before, and my previous time spent was about seven years working at Blizzard. I was laid off in June 2025 along with the rest of my team and I've been looking for a job since. This is probably the worst job market I've seen in a while.
Over the past six months I've had a few interviews that got to the final stages, a couple that got filtered out early on and a bunch more that end up completely silent despite my skills fitting the job to a tee.
The ones that sting the most are the ones where I was in the final rounds and got passed over for someone else. In particular I've had a few cases where everything seemed positive and there was just another candidate or internal transfer that ended up getting ahead. I would reach back out to the recruiter afterwards (since this had been going on for weeks now) poking at them for other positions that fit my skills, only for them to go silent. I would promptly remove them from my LinkedIn connections afterwards because I'm exhausted of pointless connections and recruiters.
But the ones that annoy me the most are all the initial filters. Coderpad, hackerrank, exams with AI proctors. All of these are intensely bullshit because companies use them as filters for different mechanisms, all of which are defeated by some asshole on their phone with whatever AI of the week they're using. So I'm inherently at a disadvantage because I try to play by the rules as these shitty apps full screen themselves and lock you out of any sort of API reference or helpful pages for when I need to recall off the top of my head the proper way to instantiate a list or heap in X language. As much as I want to strongly refuse these filters the only choice I have is to comply, because many of these filters are made by people so far away from any sort of dev work that the only thing they know is more code is betterer.
Trying to navigate all of this is a Sisyphean task amidst all of the companies heavily pushing AI garbage everywhere. It's not enough that jobs want to force you to degrade yourself and your skill to fulfill some quota on tokens burnt to Claude but they've quickly built up a system that also makes it even more impossible to actually get past layers of keyworded resume screening and busywork. Every time you apply for a job it feels like companies are scattering legos in front of you and telling you to dance barefooted on top of them to prove your worth.
And over time you start to internalize how shitty things are; how you're often the least best candidate out of a pool of other more desperate candidates. I'm one of the lucky ones too because I'm actually getting interviews even if they go nowhere. People just out of college get to experience companies pulling up the ladder completely hoping that Anthropic will remove the need for juniors entirely.
It's not like the job market was that much better before AI infested every single corner of the market, but it supercharged all of the worst aspects of everything. I've seen people supposedly smarter than I advocate for just giving in, conceding to AI coding as it's the future. But doing so means tossing out my friends who make art or the people who work their asses off to properly test and review code or the writers pouring all of their energy into even mundane dialogue. It means throwing out my dignity as a software engineer, as someone that truly gives a shit about security and code.
I won't let it take away the joy I have in being a weird computer nerd. I can't. But it's all so tiresome.
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