The horrors persist, but so do we

I have been looking for work. This is what that looks like in 2026 from the inside.

The funnel

             every opening on the board
                         |
                         v
   +-------------------------------------+
   |  1. reads like work I have done     |   full stack w/ CMS,
   |                                     |   DevOps-adjacent, MarTech
   +-------------------------------------+
                         |
                         v
   +-------------------------------------+
   |  2. pays above Tuga pay             |
   +-------------------------------------+
                         |
                         v
   +-------------------------------------+
   |  3. remote-first, foreign payroll   |
   +-------------------------------------+
                         |
                         v
   +-------------------------------------+
   |  4. survives the AI resume filter   |   before a human reads it
   +-------------------------------------+
                         |
                         v
                    what is left

The first three stages are ordinary constraints. The fourth is new, and it is the one this post is about.

Tuga pay and the remote chase

"Tuga pay" is the expression for it. Portuguese jobs are pegged to Portuguese national salaries, and joining that pool as a foreigner means drastically cutting what you earn. Most Portuguese developers know this painfully well and look outside the country for a chance to earn several times as much.

The Landing.Jobs and Damia 2026 report backs it up: fully remote roles pay clearly better than office ones.¹ So everyone chases a remote seat on a foreign payroll, and the competition for it is global.

The screen

Before AI, a decent remote opening might get ten serious applications. Someone read all ten.

Now candidates use AI to apply, so the same opening gets a hundred. Nobody has the time or headcount to read a hundred, so the company uses AI to screen them. That is the trap. The judgement about who is worth talking to has been handed to a system nobody at the company can explain or audit.

And it trims on whatever is easy to check rather than what matters. A degree is a clean yes or no. A career is prose. So someone senior enough to apply for CTO, with fifteen years of shipped work and references you can call, gets filtered out for not having a bachelor's degree, or not having one from a school the model has decided counts. No human ever sees the file. The rejection says "due to high demand".

This scales. Every company doing it makes applying more of a lottery, so candidates apply more widely with more AI, which makes the volume worse, which pushes more companies onto more aggressive filters. Nobody in the loop is measuring whether it finds good people. It only has to make the pile smaller.

The same thing is creeping into interviews: AI-generated questions scored against an AI-generated rubric by someone without the background to judge either. A correct answer that does not match what the model expected loses.

The juniors

If the screen is hard on seniors without the right paperwork, juniors are not in the building at all. In the Portuguese report, juniors have all but vanished from the candidate pool. Stanford's payroll-based study found the same pattern: early-career employment in AI-exposed jobs, software included, dropped while experienced workers held steady.² Nobody fired them. The jobs just stopped being posted.

That is a problem for later. The people who can tell when the machine is wrong are the ones who learned by shipping something bad and owning it. Stop hiring juniors and in ten years you stop getting seniors.

But so do we

None of this is a reason to stop.

Keep building and shipping. Public, working things are the one proof of ability that gets around a screen that cannot read a CV. Keep using the tools, with discipline. If you have any say in hiring, read the applications yourself, and take the junior.

The horrors persist. So do we.

Previously:

1. Part I: Genealogy

2. Part II: The Confidence Game

3. Part III: Where the Leverage Is Now