'I Gave It 110%': Graduate Worked a Year in Tech, Built AI Systems and Still Couldn't Escape Layoffs

'I Gave It 110%': Graduate Worked a Year in Tech, Built AI Systems and Still Couldn't Escape Layoffs

A software developer hired straight out of an engineering degree in 2025 has set out in a public post what a year of long hours at an enterprise employer delivered. The account starts before the job: degree years spent on competitive programming, system design study, and side projects, all to stand out in a market the developer calls brutal. Then the job itself. High-throughput event pipelines built, multi-agent AI workflows designed from scratc…