David James Rodriguez

A new grad from a top-tier engineering program just hit month 11 of unemployment with $197k in debt and a 3.9 GPA 1,243 applications sent since graduation. 47 phone screens. 8 technical rounds. Zero offers. Last week he finally got to final rounds at a Series B startup building developer tools The engineering VP was brutally honest: "Two years ago this role would've been perfect for you. We had 15 junior engineers writing unit tests, building APIs, doing code reviews." "Now our 3 senior engineers use Claude Sonnet to generate entire codebases. They review AI output instead of junior code. Ship 60% faster than the old team." The position got eliminated during his interview process His parents keep asking when he'll "find something in computers" while he delivers groceries for $14/hour The financial aid office that sold him on "guaranteed career outcomes" stopped returning his calls in August His algorithms professor posted on LinkedIn yesterday about the "exciting future of AI-augmented development" Same professor whose recommendation letter couldn't get him past ATS filters at companies that no longer hire humans for the work he spent 4 years learning The offshore team that replaced his dream job? They're using the same Cursor setup he taught himself, making $28k annually But hey, at least he's "future-ready" with that computer science degree