Rejected in final round over "how do you use AI?" — after 2,000 applications post-layoff
ustype · reddit · 2026-10-02
A Lahore-based engineer with 5+ years of experience was laid off when his Australian employer shut the local office, saying AI now did much of the work. In six months he applied to 2,000+ jobs, got 12 interviews and zero offers — despite a 1,000+ star open source repo, an AI app with 8,000+ downloads he had to kill over API costs, and daily vibe-coding with Claude Code and Cursor.
The post focuses on a final managerial round that went perfectly until the question "how do you use AI?" He described his AI-first workflow — prompting for plans, making the AI ask him 10 questions to catch hallucinations, building his own editing tool — and agreed that someone using AI with good analytical thinking can be a good engineer. The 15-year-veteran interviewer visibly disagreed. The author wonders if he should have emphasized debugging and fundamentals over vibe coding. A telling snapshot of how hiring attitudes toward AI still vary wildly.
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