Kid graduated Stanford CS last month with $180k in debt and a 3.8 GPA
Applied to 847 entry-level positions since January
Got 3 phone screens. Zero offers.
Interviewed at a Series C startup in October. Hiring manager told him straight up: "We used to have 8 junior engineers. Now we have 2 seniors with Cursor and they ship faster than the old team of 10."
His roommate who graduated with him is driving for DoorDash
The career services office is still telling kids that "software engineering is recession-proof" while their own alumni network shows 67% of 2023 CS grads still unemployed or underemployed
Meanwhile offshore contractors in Hyderabad are getting $35/hour to do senior-level work with Claude 3.5
The same work that used to go to American new grads at $140k total comp
His internship manager from last summer just got laid off. Team of 12 mobile engineers replaced by 3 contractors and a React Native AI agent
The bootcamp kids who graduated in 2022 and got $120k offers? Half of them managed out during "performance reviews" that were really just AI productivity audits
He's $180k in the hole for a degree in a field that stopped hiring humans at his level 18 months ago
But sure, keep telling kids to "learn to code"
Most likely they hire H1Bs instead.
I know someone who was let go from 2 jobs in computer relates stuff, was told we are cutting back. His coworkers told him that 2 H1Bs started the next day.
Next job, the manager openly told him that he had made his life difficult in hopes that he would quit but since he did not quite he was letting him go with a note to HR that he was incompetent because he preferred to work with people from his native country. India.
Just got this DM from a follower:
Hey dude, I need to vent this to someone who gets it. I've been at this Big Tech company (you know the one) for almost 6 years now—senior SWE, TC around $350k last year with RSUs still vesting. Thought I was bulletproof after surviving the 2023-2024 bloodbaths and then pivoting hard into the AI org. But fuck, the ground is shifting under my feet faster than I can keep up.
Last week in our all-hands, leadership was bragging about how the team's "AI leverage ratio" hit 4.2x—meaning each engineer is now shipping what used to take a team of four. They showed the metrics: feature velocity up 180% YoY while headcount's down another 22% since Q4 '25. The slide literally had a photo of Cursor + Claude Sonnet 4 workflows replacing entire squads. Everyone clapped like trained seals, but I saw three faces go pale—they're the mid-level folks who just finished documenting their entire codebase for the "knowledge distillation" project.
My direct report, this solid L5 who joined right after me, got put on a 30-day PIP after his productivity dashboard dipped below the new AI-augmented benchmark. The benchmark? It's literally what the offshore team in India hits using the exact prompts he used to write. He trained them on our internal style guide last quarter—now they're outperforming him at $28/hour all-in. He told me privately he's burning through savings and eyeing real estate licensing because "at least houses don't get refactored by agents overnight."
The internal job board is a ghost town. Entry-level SWE roles? Frozen since mid-'25. What few postings go up are tagged "AI-native preferred" and get 2,000+ apps in hours, mostly from people already on H-1Bs or contractors. Meanwhile, they're quietly converting more mid-tier positions to "AI orchestration" contractors—$90-110/hour remote from LATAM or Eastern Europe, no benefits, 6-month contracts. My manager admitted in 1:1 that if the next Grok/Claude/Anthropic release closes the last 10-15% quality gap, we'll probably cut another layer.
I'm hanging on because I'm one of the ones who owns the prompt libraries and fine-tuning pipelines now. They need humans to babysit the models until the self-improving loops actually work without constant human intervention. But I see the writing: every time we make the system more autonomous, we make our own roles more optional. The alumni Slack is full of 2024-2025 grads DMing for coffee chats because their referrals bounce—67% underemployed or gigging according to the last poll. One kid I mentored last year is back living with parents after burning through his signing bonus.
I used to tell people "just upskill in AI, you'll be fine." Now I feel like a fraud saying it. If I lost this tomorrow, I'd be competing with the same offshore talent I've been helping scale, plus a flood of recently "managed out" seniors. My emergency fund is decent, but the mortgage isn't. Thinking about side hustles in trades or something offline—plumbing, electrical, anything that can't be prompted away.
This feels like watching the industry eat itself from the inside while pretending it's evolution. You still feeling secure over there, or is it hitting your shop too? Need to hear I'm not going insane.
_____
guy talked to "23 CTOs" like he's speedrunning LinkedIn clout. the dates are already wrong, half the predictions should be verifiable by now, and the whole thing reads like it was written by Claude to scare junior devs into mass engagement. that said, Block did just cut 40% of its staff and the stock went up 25%, so the underlying trend is real even if this specific post smells like fiction /s
Just got off calls with 23 CTOs across fintech, adtech, and logistics
The headcount math has fundamentally changed
Average team that was 12 engineers 18 months ago is now planned for 4 by Q2 2025
One CTO walked me through their "AI-first restructuring": 47 engineers today, 16 planned post-reorg. Same product velocity expected.
Another just cut their entire QA org. 31 people. Replaced with 2 senior engineers running automated testing through Claude API calls. CTO said "quality actually improved"
The most honest one told me they're keeping 1 senior engineer per major product area plus contractors in Bangalore with Copilot access. "Why pay $180K when $35K plus AI gets you 85% of the output"
New grad hiring is a dead category. Zero offers planned across all 23 companies for 2025. "We'll hire seniors to manage AI agents instead"
Mid-level engineers (L4-L5) are the most endangered. Senior enough to be expensive, not senior enough to manage AI effectively. Three CTOs called them "the squeezed middle"
One logistics company eliminated 28 frontend engineers last month. Replaced with 4 seniors using AI-generated components and offshore contractors doing integration work
Most chilling quote: "We realized we were paying Silicon Valley salaries for work that AI plus a smart college grad in India can do for 1/8th the cost"
The timeline they're all working toward is brutal: 40-50% headcount reduction by end of 2025
"Efficiency gains" is the phrase they use on board decks. What they mean is humans are now optional.
Mumbai and Bangalore outsourcing firms are scaling like I've never seen
Infosys added 47,000 engineers in the last 9 months. TCS hiring 2,100 per week. Wipro opened 8 new delivery centers since January.
American companies discovered something: Senior engineer in Austin making $180k can be replaced by two L4s in Hyderabad making $18k each plus AI tooling
The quality gap closed overnight. Indian teams with Cursor and Claude are shipping features indistinguishable from SF teams at 85% cost savings
Accenture's Bangalore office went from 12,000 to 31,000 headcount while their US operations dropped 6,200 people
The arbitrage is insane. American mid-level making $140k replaced by Indian senior making $28k who's more productive because they actually use the AI tools instead of complaining about them
Cognizant told their US clients: "Same deliverables, same timelines, 70% cost reduction" and enterprise buyers said yes to everything
One Fortune 500 moved their entire platform engineering team offshore in October. 23 American engineers averaging $165k replaced by 31 Indian engineers averaging $24k
The Indian teams are hungrier. They're learning the AI tools faster. They're not bitter about "being replaced by robots" - they're using the robots to replace American engineers
HCL hired 15,000 people in Q3 alone specifically for "AI-augmented development" contracts
American engineers spent two years debating whether Copilot would make them obsolete
Indian engineers spent two years mastering Copilot to make American engineers obsolete
