127,000 Layoffs. AI Is Hiring. You're Still Sending the Same Resume.
The tech job market isn’t broken. Your positioning is.
Real John here! 2 of Clubs, if you know you know. I’ll do another card at the end of this paragraph. I’m writing about the layoffs again, mainly because I have had a lot of people reach out to me and I would love to help them, but they also need to know what we are looking for. Being all Clauded-up in today’s world is great, BUT, you still need foundational knowledge of what is good code and what is AI slop. You also need to know how to use the new tools successfully. I love the craft of things, woodworking with only hand tools, sleight of hand with only a deck of cards, and well-timed counters in Street Fighter. However, the craft is only the foundation, the new tools are much more than that and help accelerate and educate as you get more familiar with them. I wouldn’t want someone building my house with a hand chisel. I would appreciate his ability to do it, but I want the house built in my lifetime. LOL. Ok, let’s get into it. King of Spades (see, there’s another one, and yes it me). I do use AI to help edit things and rephrase things, but its me. :-) Hard to prove unless I write on a live stream, and even then it could be a generated video. Oh, authenticity is a thing right? Sorry, got distracted. Back to the newsletter this week. (oh, got a few new decks also, shout out to Art of Play in Brooklyn, NICE WORK!).
I applied to over 300 jobs after leaving my last role.
Three hundred. I have 30+ years of experience. I’ve been a CTO, a VP of Engineering, I’ve built teams from zero, shipped products that actually worked, reduced cloud spend by 40%, and maintained 90%+ team retention for over two years straight. I have a patent. I’ve taught at universities.
Didn’t matter. Most rejections came back within the hour. Sometimes minutes.
At first I thought the market was broken. Then I realized something worse: I was playing by the old rules in a game that had completely changed the board.
The Numbers Tell a Brutal Story
Over 127,000 US tech workers were laid off in 2025. That number isn’t slowing down in 2026. Every week there’s a new headline. Another round, another “restructuring,” another LinkedIn post with the blue banner.
Meanwhile, AI-adjacent roles are on fire. AI engineers, ML ops, prompt engineers, agent developers, AI product managers. Companies cannot hire fast enough. Patronus AI just raised $50 million specifically to help enterprises test AI agents before deploying them. That is an entire company, funded at $50M, that exists because the demand for AI implementation outpaced the supply of people who actually know how to do it safely.
There are two job markets right now. One is collapsing. One is exploding. And most laid-off developers are standing in the wrong line.
This Is Not a Job Market Problem
Stop blaming the economy. Stop blaming AI for “taking jobs.” Stop blaming the ATS systems that ghosted you.
This is a skills translation problem. Full stop.
Here’s what I mean. You have 8 years of backend Java experience. You’ve built APIs, handled scale, debugged production fires. That experience is genuinely valuable. But your resume says “Senior Software Engineer, Java, Spring Boot, Microservices.” It does not say what you can do with AI tooling. It does not say you’ve shipped anything using Claude Code or Cursor. It does not mention that you understand how to wire an LLM into a real workflow and keep it from hallucinating on your users.
The hiring manager, who is now also probably using AI to screen you, doesn’t see the connection. So neither does the system. So you get a rejection in 47 minutes.
You didn’t fail. You failed to translate.
The Skills You Have Already Qualify You
Here’s the part nobody is saying loud enough: most of what AI needs, experienced developers already have.
Understanding data flows? You have that. Debugging unpredictable systems? You’ve done that for years. Knowing when a tool is wrong for the job? That’s senior engineering judgment. Something a junior AI hype-chaser absolutely does not have.
The gap isn’t your experience. The gap is vocabulary and proof.
Vocabulary: can you speak about AI integration, agent design, retrieval-augmented generation, MCP tools, and evaluation pipelines in a job interview without faking it?
Proof: have you shipped anything, anything at all, that uses AI as a functional layer? Even a side project. Even something small.
I built Cash Critters (cashcritters.com) for $50/month using Lovable, Vercel, and Claude Code. It’s a real product. It has real users. It teaches kids about money. It also serves as proof that I know how to build with AI tools end to end. That one project changed how I talk about my work in every conversation.
What You Should Actually Do
Stop submitting 300 applications with the same resume. Start here instead:
1. Pick one AI tool and build something real with it. Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable, Replit. Pick one. Build a tool that solves a problem you actually have. Deploy it. Put it on GitHub. Put it on your resume.
2. Retranslate your existing experience. Go through your last three roles. For every project, ask: where would AI have fit? Where does it fit now? Rewrite your bullets around that lens.
3. Learn the vocabulary of the new stack. Agents. MCP. RAG. Evals. You don’t need to be an ML researcher. You need to know what these are and when to use them. One weekend of reading will do it.
4. Ship publicly and talk about it. Write one LinkedIn post about something you built. One newsletter. One GitHub repo with a README that actually explains what the thing does. Distribution is the new credential.
The market isn’t broken. The translation layer is. Fix that, and the market opens back up.
The developers who figure this out are going to have the best careers of their lives. AI doesn’t replace engineers who understand systems, judgment, and scale. It multiplies them. The ones sitting on the sidelines waiting for the market to “return to normal” are going to be waiting a long time.
Normal isn’t coming back. The new normal is better. Go learn the language and go build something amazing.
John Mann is the founder of Startups and Code LLC, a software engineering executive with 30+ years in the industry, and the guy who built Cash Critters for $50/month because constraints are a feature, not a bug. Subscribe for weekly takes on AI, startups, and building things that matter.