RejectDev

His real name was never important. For almost 28 years he was simply known as “Senior”. He started coding in the late 90s, when C++ was still raw and unforgiving. He manually managed memory with malloc and free, hunted segmentation faults with gdb at 4 a.m., debugged race conditions that could bring down production servers serving thousands of users, and fixed buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs long before those terms became everyday vocabulary. He wrote kernel modules, device drivers, and low-latency trading systems that moved billions of dollars daily. He survived dependency hell years before package.json existed — back when you had to compile everything from source and pray that the Makefile wouldn’t break. He lived through three recessions, multiple company acquisitions, brutal reorgs, and endless on-call rotations. He had a mortgage, two kids in college, and a wife who tolerated his 80-hour work weeks and constant burnout for decades. Then came 2024–2025. The company he had given more than ten years of his life to hired a 26-year-old “Head of Engineering” who proudly declared that “real programmers are obsolete.” The entire team was forced to switch to Cursor, Claude, and GitHub Copilot. New success metrics shifted from code quality and system stability to “prompt quality” and “vibe.” Senior was repeatedly told he was “too slow,” “not a team player,” and “resistant to progress” simply because he refused to let AI write core business logic. One ordinary Tuesday morning he was pulled into a 15-minute Zoom call. No warning. No proper performance review. Just a cold message: “You’re no longer a good culture fit. We’re moving to an AI-first development approach. Your position has been eliminated.” They escorted him out the same day. What followed was hell. He applied to more than 650 jobs. Most applications were instantly rejected by AI resume screeners that flagged him as “overqualified” or a “flight risk.” The few interviews he managed to get ended the momen