"These are Not the Droids You're Looking for": Corporate Propaganda Masks Mass Offshoring with Inflated AI Hype
Recently, I came across an article in The Atlantic magazine titled "The Computer Science Bubble is Bursting" written by Horowitch (2025).1 This wasn't news to me. After graduating in May of 2022 with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, I watched the job market plummet right in front of me.2 Around the time I graduated, I received interview offers with several different companies, but the job market retracted faster than they could hire me. One prominent local company ended a phone interview with the promise of a follow-up that never materialized. Another well-known company ghosted me after scheduling a phone interview with them only just a couple weeks prior. I went through four rounds of interviews with another company, an international fitness company, that began with a behavioral interview with two company executives that went so well that one of them exclaimed "When can we hire this guy?" and ended with three grueling, one-hour, back-to-back interviews in a single day. Ultimately, the company refused to hire me on the basis of my disability, despite having been told by one of the executives that I had performed well in the interviews and despite having created a product used by the company's customers that multiple executives praised me for building (and one even apologized to me in private for having to build in the first place, since the company did not have its own version of the product). But that is a story for another time.