Both Doors Are Closing

I noticed something that sounds like a joke but isn't. Hackathons reject you now too.

The classic playbook used to be this. Nobody hires you without experience, so you join a hackathon, build something in 36 hours, meet people, and that's how you assemble the first rung. It was the fire escape when the front door was closed. If a job wasn't going to take you, a hackathon would. There you met companies, sponsors, and other builders just as hungry as you.

Both doors are closing at the same time now.

On one side: the job market

The entry-level numbers in tech are not pretty. The Pragmatic Engineer reports that software engineering openings hit a five-year low. A Handshake report shows that tech internship postings dropped 30% since 2023. 68% of 2024 grads reported "extended silence" from recruiters. Pay attention to that metric. It's not rejection. It's silence.

Big tech, which used to swallow juniors by the hundreds, cut new-grad hiring by more than 50% since 2019. Computer science grad unemployment sits at 6.1%. And the data point that lands hardest: 37% of employers say they'd rather "hire" AI than a recent graduate. An AI model as a teammate over your first junior hire.

Anthropic published its Economic Index showing that 79% of conversations on Claude Code involve direct automation: the model doing the task, not assisting someone in doing it. That's a massive cut to the surface area where a junior used to learn, because those small tasks now get closed by the model alone.

On the other side: the hackathons

Here's where it gets absurd.

TreeHacks 2025 at Stanford accepted 1,000 hackers out of 12,000 applicants. 8.3% acceptance rate. More selective than most elite universities. HackMIT accepts around 1,000 students per event with thousands applying every year. The most prestigious hackathons became their own admissions process: essays, references, per-school quotas, puzzle hunts to jump the line.

The joke is this. Hackathons were invented to give a shot to people without opportunities, people who wanted to build and meet companies without having the perfect resume. We've moved to "prove you deserve to come build." The thing designed to help people without experience now asks for experience to let you in.

It sounds like a joke. It isn't.

Why everything closes at once

Two forces compressing the market at the same time.

Supply went up. After 2022, tens of thousands of experienced engineers got laid off. Suddenly the same role that used to go to a junior has twenty mid-levels fighting over it. The junior isn't losing because they're bad. They're losing on math.

Demand narrowed. Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code absorbed the basic tasks that used to be a junior's onramp. There's no more "go fix this small bug to learn the codebase." Claude closes that bug in four minutes. So companies only hire people who can already operate on top of AI, not beneath it.

Hackathons follow the same logic. Sponsors (the companies paying for it) don't want to see twenty generic "hello world" projects. They want projects that demonstrate real technical range. So organizers filter harder at the door. When 12,000 people apply for 1,000 spots, filtering is the only operational option.

It's not a conspiracy. It's the same funnel compressing all at once.

The part nobody talks about

There's a specific feeling that hits before all of this, and nobody writes about it. I'll try.

A hackathon opens applications. Before they close, the Discord server fills up with "looking for a backend dev" and "team of 3, need 1." You watch people pair off, groups coalesce, DMs get exchanged. Screenshots appear of "team of 4 locked, ready to build." Everyone seems to have someone.

You don't tap anyone. Nobody taps you either.

It's the gym class feeling. The team captains pick their friends first, then the loud ones, then the decent athletes, and you end up watching the pile shrink against the wall. You know the result before the last pick gets made.

Same thing on LinkedIn. Your feed fills with "thrilled to share I'm joining the Y Combinator S26 cohort." Accelerator batch photos. Team offsite selfies. Everyone building together, except you.

I want to be direct about what that does. It's not just the rejection. It's the visibility of the non-rejection happening to everyone else. That's a weirder, heavier thing.

If you're there right now, listen. That feeling is not a signal that you're not good enough. It's a signal that team formation is a one-pass sorting problem that runs fast, and a lot of it runs on prior relationships, not on merit. The people tapping each other are tapping people they already knew. The first time is always the hardest because you haven't accumulated those relationships yet. Every time after is easier because the people you built with once remember you.

So the move isn't to wait until somebody picks you. It's to be the person who starts the server, opens the repo, writes the tweet asking if anyone wants to build X this weekend. You'll feel cringe posting it the first three times. Post it anyway. The people who respond are the people you needed from the start.

The advice I've been chewing on

There's a Jimmy Carr line I've been chewing on for months:

"Stop waiting for someone to hand you the role. Give yourself permission to just start doing it. Don't wait to be brought flowers. Plant your own garden."

It sounds like a coffee mug. But when you read it as a concrete response to double rejection, it lands. The only credential left, when nobody is granting you one, is the work itself.

If the job won't let you in, and the hackathon won't let you in, the only thing left for the builder is to build. Not "build to attract recruiters" because that's noise. Build because it's the only thing that doesn't go through admissions. A real side project shipped on GitHub. A blog with 12 of your own posts. A Twitter bot somebody used. A Chrome extension somebody installed. A tutorial that helped a stranger. Those things can't be rejected by a filter.

Accumulate that for a year, two years, and something odd starts happening. People come to you. Not the next day. But the question inverts. At some point you stop applying to jobs and people start writing to ask if you're available.

Find the other nerds

This is the part people underestimate the most when stuck in the rejection loop. You're not alone. There are a lot of builders in the same spot, and the difference between the ones who quit and the ones who keep going is not talent. It's community.

MLH, the student hackathon network, has more than 600,000 members and runs 200+ hackathons a year. Discord is full of niche servers (AI, indie hacking, web3, game dev) where people share side projects, ask for feedback, form teams. GitHub has its streak feature, but it also has humans who'll comment on your PR when you work in public. Subreddits like r/learnprogramming, r/SideProject and similar can read rough sometimes, but they work.

The point of the community isn't only for when you get rejected. It's for sharing: which hackathons have good signal to noise, which programs are open, which companies still hire juniors, what paths the people who escaped the loop actually took. That info isn't on Google. It lives in DMs and Discord threads.

The people who will pull you out of the hole aren't recruiters. They're other builders one rung above you, because they actually have time to look at your work, they will recommend you when someone in their Discord asks "anyone know someone good at X", and they'll pull you onto the next project.

One concrete tip: the hackathons that reject hard are the prestige ones. There are hundreds of smaller events (regional, online, thematic) that reject almost no one. They don't have TreeHacks brand. But they have what you actually need: people building, at your stage, with your same anxiety.

You're already in the 1%

Jakob Nielsen published the 90-9-1 rule back in 2006: in any online community, 90% are lurkers (pure consumption), 9% engage occasionally, and 1% create the content. Recent studies suggest the ratio has shifted a bit, but the order of magnitude is the same.

Think about it. If you're applying to hackathons, assembling side projects, pushing code, writing threads or posts, you're already in the 1%. Not because you're a genetic genius. Because most people consume. You produce. That distinction alone removes you from the 90%.

It's not loser consolation. It's just the math of participation. The person working a random day job who ships side projects on weekends is in a demographically different category from someone who only scrolls TikTok. A hackathon rejection doesn't take you out of that category. The only thing that does is stopping.

What I want you to leave with

You're going to get rejected from jobs. You're going to get rejected from hackathons. It's no longer "you passed the filter" or "you didn't." There are so many filters that every process is basically a biased lottery.

But the one thing no filter can do is stop you from working. Build in public, connect with other builders, and accumulate a body of work that outlives any individual rejection. That route is slower. It's lonelier at the start. It also has no admissions.

And by the time the people rejecting you today realize they need you, you're already half a mile ahead.

Plant your own garden. Rejections dry up fast when there are flowers growing.

PS. If you ask for help on X, don't be an asshole when someone asks you for help.