It must have been an auto update. Apple Intelligence, Apple’s flavor of AI, was suddenly installed and enabled on my MacBook. In place of regular email subjects were terse summaries. It happened just in time for my first official rejection letter during this most recent job search.

Through the magic of modern technology the four sentences of polite rejection were summarized into two.

Thank you for taking the time to interview with the team and your patience in allowing us some time getting back to you. We enjoyed getting to know you throughout the process. However, we have decided that it’s not a good fit at this time.

I really appreciate the time you’ve taken so far meeting with the team and on the take home. We wish you the best of luck in your job search.

Became

Company has decided it is not a good fit at this time. Best of luck in your job search

It may sound like a strange thing, but rejection letters are a kindness. Most companies, recruiters, and even candidates would rather ghost each other. Feedback of any kind was rare, and meaningful feedback the rarest still. I appreciate every rejection letter for the closure they provide, and I respect the effort and character it takes to send them.

I couldn’t decide whether Apple Intelligence was adding insult to injury. I never opted in for AI summaries and after a while took some pains to turn off as many of the Apple Intelligence features as I was aware. For emails in particular I found the original subject lines and summaries to be much more useful than their generated counterparts.

This was indicative of AI factored into my job search in early 2025.

Now more than two years into the AI hype bubble, AI was indeed bleeding into all corners and crevices of the tech industry. Even though it did not directly appear at any stage of interviewing, it was always on the periphery.

AI was everywhere in the job hunt, just not where you’d think.

The most visible portion was in the coding challenges and interviews. It seemed nearly every company had deployed a variety of tech to ensure I wasn’t using AI.

This extended to companies that advertised their use of AI, even those with “AI” in their name.

I’ve heard of the people selling pickaxes during a gold rush, but don’t discount the gun dealers and barbed wire fence merchants. There’s plenty of money to be made there too.

So far as the tooling… There were apps that recorded me performing coding challenges through my computer’s webcam, supposedly tracking my eye movements. There was audio recording to make sure nothing was feeding me answers. There were plugins that peeped at my browser history while I toiled away coding. There were tools that stole my computer’s ability to copy and paste text.

At a couple companies I applied to I was offered the option of getting my resume screened by a human or by an AI. On one I chose the human, and on the other I chose the AI. Neither called me in for additional interviews.

I absorbed this climate and started to modulate my behavior. Some videos of interviewers catching phony candidates on vid calls made its way onto my feed. “Your video looks weird. Can you do me a favor and just wave your hand in front of your face?” The interviewer asks. The interviewee immediately gets flustered and refuses to comply. So I made it a point on live interviews to always adjust my glasses a few times.

In prepping for an interview, a recruiter told me “if you struggle during the coding challenge, just remember to talk to them about what you’re thinking. Ask questions.” This is good time-worn advice, but she followed it up with a new one: “one candidate was struggling then went off camera briefly. When he came back on he suddenly was able to finish the challenge easily. The team assumed he just punched the problem into an AI, and they passed on him.”

“Eureeka” moments happen in life. I’ve had my share of problems that I solved immediately after throwing up my hands in frustration and standing up to take a walk, or refill a coffee. But in this new AI world such things could look suspect. So now in interviews I stayed seated. I looked ahead, careful not to make it seem like I was looking off to the side for coaching or AI assistance. I tried to be talkative. Anything to assuage any doubt that I wasn’t human.

AI came up in interviews exactly twice.

One interviewer gave me the coding challenge and opined about the futility of it. “Eventually AI will be writing all this code, but until then let’s debug this React script”.

I didn’t get an offer.

In the next instance, I was on the second round with a small startup. After a great conversation with the tech lead, I met with one of the founders. He was much more guarded in his demeanor. “What do you think about AI?” he asked, a general question in what had been more focused on the job at hand. His eyes narrowed and studied me as I responded.

I gave my honest stock answer: “I think its going to be more like 3D printing than the metaverse. It can do some interesting things and has legitimate use cases. Its not going away, but right now the people pitching it are over selling. They’ve raised expectations too high.”

“Interesting. I like asking that question because everyone has a passionate answer”

I didn’t get an offer.

Summary

Right now the interviewing process is hostile to AI, but that’s due in large part to the generation of the interviewers.

I don’t know what’s going on in the typical College or High School, but there’s plenty of fear-stoking reporting that AI is largely propping up the entire enterprise. Students are apparently using AI to write all their papers, and code all their coursework.

Eventually those kids will be the ones doing the interviewing. At that point I anticipate attitudes towards AI will flip 180 degrees. Suddenly it’ll be looked at as odd if I don’t use an AI to solve some portion of the coding assessment, hell maybe that will be the whole coding assessment.

Based on my experiences we’re nowhere near that yat, but this is all changing rapidly.