'I can't get on the AI train': A 3 a.m. rejection email pushed an engineer to leave tech and go into nursing
'I can't get on the AI train': A 3 a.m. rejection email pushed an engineer to leave tech and go into nursing.
Cristina Estupiñán spent nearly a decade writing software in Silicon Valley. Then, earlier this year, she got a rejection email in the middle of the night, and that was the final straw.
Estupiñán, 33, had been interviewing with a European company for two and a half months while recovering from a bruising layoff. She was looking forward to finally getting an answer, but the email arrived in her inbox at 3 a.m. "After I got that email, I was like, 'OK, I'm going to be going into nursing,'" she told Business Insider (1). "I was just done."
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Estupiñán is now completing the prerequisite coursework to enter Rutgers University's accelerated nursing program (2) in 2028, a 15-month track designed for people who already hold a bachelor's degree in another field. Her plan is to become a nurse practitioner.
Her primary complaint about the job hunt was that virtually everyone she spoke with, from recruiters to managers to other engineers, seemingly wanted her to show she was enthusiastic about AI. "I have to make up something about what excites me about AI because, frankly, nothing really excites me about AI," she told BI.
But she admitted that last email sent her over the edge: "I can't get on the AI train. I just can't do it."
Estupiñán, to be clear, clearly loves technology. She credited GitHub Copilot with being genuinely useful in her last role, saying it automated the repetitive parts of coding while leaving her own creativity untouched. But her problems were less about the tools, rather than the culture that's grown around said tools.
Estupiñán's disenchantment set in last year, during the job hunt. The cultural aspect of AI pervading every conversation at work was one thing, but she also worries about the environmental and social costs of AI. "I certainly don't want to be monitored," she said.
This waning enthusiasm for AI is becoming increasingly common among software engineers. In Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey (3), which drew responses from more than 49,000 developers, favorable sentiment toward AI tools slid to 60%, down from upwards of 70% in 2023 and 2024. Usage, meanwhile, kept climbing: 84% of developers now use or plan to use the tools.
What's interesting about that developer survey is only 29% of respondents said they trust the accuracy of AI output, down 11 percentage points from the prior year — and the most common frustration, cited by two-thirds of developers, was AI code that comes out almost right but it still isn't quite there, which then eats time in the debugging process.
When you pull back and look at the broader labor market, a lot of folks are reckoning with the impact of AI in the workplace. In some cases, people are trying to break out; in others, folks are trying to get. back in. Over 127,000 workers at U.S.-based tech companies were laid off (4) in mass job cuts over the course of 2025, according to Crunchbase's tracker.
Cuts have seemingly accelerated in 2026, with companies increasingly naming AI as the reason. When Block cut its workforce (5) sharply this year, CEO Jack Dorsey wrote in a memo that the move wasn't about financial difficulty but about "the growing capability of AI tools to perform a wider range of tasks."
And it's tough for those trying to break into the labor market. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York pegged unemployment (6) among recent computer science grads at 6.1% and computer engineering grads at 7.5%, both higher than the rates for art history, English or performing arts majors. Software developer job postings on Indeed fell 71% (6) between February 2022 and August 2025, per data the St. Louis Fed highlighted.
Universities, meanwhile, roughly doubled the number of computer science degrees they awarded over the past decade, flooding a shrinking market.
Plenty of leaders, especially in Silicon Valley, have pushed back on the doom-and-gloom narrative, though. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has called AI job fears "complete nonsense," arguing the technology makes companies want to hire more engineers, not fewer. But obviously it's significantly more difficult at the entry level.
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