Adobe director’s son loses job offer, sparks debate on tech hiring

A study by Anthropic found that AI systems can already assist with 75% of tasks commonly performed by software programmers, and the entry-level hiring market is starting to reflect that shift in uncomfortable ways.

When the director of programme management at Adobe, Shailesh Misra, turned to LinkedIn to find his son a software engineering job after a campus offer was rescinded, the post drew 350,000 views and surfaced a conversation the tech industry has been quietly having for months.

He wrote on LinkedIn that a leading tech company had withdrawn a campus placement offer made to his son, a computer engineering graduate from Thapar College, as part of a broader revocation affecting multiple hires. He asked his network for referrals.

The post gained traction after an X user shared a screenshot with the caption: "If the son of a director at Adobe is facing this, then the job market is really brutal." That framing connections and credentials no longer guaranteeing outcomes resonated with thousands of respondents.

Tech companies, however, have been scaling back campus hiring commitments made during the post-pandemic hiring surge. Offer withdrawals that once would have been rare are now recurring often enough that freshers are treating accepted offers with some scepticism.

Commenters on the viral post described the pattern bluntly: "The market is so cooked that even people with connections are posting 'open to work'."

The Anthropic study does not conclude that programmers are being replaced, but its finding that AI can assist with three-quarters of their daily tasks explains why companies are hiring fewer junior engineers.

Stefan Mai, a former engineer at Meta and Amazon and co-founder of interview coaching platform Hello Interview, who told CNN that AI has hit engineering recruitment "like an atomic bomb", with traditional coding interviews increasingly struggling to measure real-world readiness?

Executives at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have each described a shift where engineers spend less time writing code and more time directing AI systems and making architectural decisions.