A laid-off Blizzard veteran says AI didn't break tech hiring, it supercharged the rot

Venting into the void after Blizzard

The bearblog post comes from a roughly ten-year software and games veteran laid off from Blizzard in June 2025, now six months into what they call the worst job market they've ever seen. The thesis isn't that AI broke hiring. It's that AI "supercharged all of the worst aspects" of a market that was already broken.

The specifics are concrete. Automated screening tools like CodePad, HackerRank and AI proctoring punish candidates who answer honestly while being trivially gamed by anyone willing to run an assistant in another window. Companies, the author writes, have started fixating on "tokens burnt" as a proxy for productivity instead of measuring skill. Then there's a line in the sand: the author refuses to use AI coding at all, framing it as an ethical choice, because it threatens their artist and writer friends and may erase the entry-level roles that let people break in. The tone is bitter and exhausted, but pointedly unwilling to surrender dignity.

The thread says the rot is older than the model

The most deflating reply in the thread came from an engineer who'd already lived this once, in the 2022–2023 cuts.

"To me a lot of this sounds like people experiencing how terrible tech hiring has become for the first time after being in a stable job for a long time. Almost everything the Author said, was something I'd experienced when I was laid off in the 2022-2023 wave… At the time I was told 'it was a skill issue'." — an engineer from the 2022–2023 layoff cycle

Two people from outside app development said their corner is the opposite of starved. One works at an ML-infrastructure shop that's hiring hard.

"I work in an industry tangentially involved with the ML build-out… if you have like 3+ years of experience with PCIe, Ethernet, DDR, you're a shoe in… stock base compensation has taken off like a rocket." — an engineer at an ML-hardware company that is hiring

A second data point came from chip design.

"Silicon design/verification. In really high demand at the moment, I guess because of the death of Moore's Law - now it is much more worthwhile making custom chips." — someone in silicon design/verification

The one direct hit on the essay's morality came over its central conflation.

"Conflating things in this inflammatory way is a big mistake. Using a technology employers want you to use is not betraying your friends." — a commenter contesting the moral framing

Put together, the replies redraw the map: the crater is real but local to application engineering, and the parts of the industry building the AI itself are the ones handing out the offers.