A Laid-Off Engineer's Lament on the AI-Wrecked Tech Job Market

A software engineer with roughly a decade of experience—seven years of it at Blizzard before a June 2025 layoff—vents about six months of fruitless job hunting in what they call the worst market they’ve seen. The pattern is familiar and demoralizing: a handful of interviews that reach final rounds only to lose out to another candidate or an internal transfer, recruiters who go silent the moment a role falls through, and a larger pile of applications that vanish without any response despite a clean skills match.

The author’s sharpest frustration is aimed at the automated front door of modern hiring—CoderPad, HackerRank, AI-proctored coding exams that lock down your screen and cut off reference material. They argue these filters are theater: easily gamed by anyone willing to cheat with an off-screen AI assistant, so honest candidates who play by the rules are structurally disadvantaged. Layered on top are keyword resume screens and the industry’s broader push to make AI coding mandatory, which the author experiences as busywork designed by people far removed from actual development.

Beneath the rant is a real anxiety about where the profession is heading. The author worries that companies are ‘pulling up the ladder’ on junior engineers in the bet that tools like Claude will eliminate the need for them, and refuses the advice to simply capitulate to AI-driven work—seeing that as a betrayal of artists, testers, writers, and engineers who take craft and security seriously. It’s an anecdotal but resonant snapshot of how AI hype is amplifying the most dehumanizing parts of tech hiring.