I ran a fake hiring simulation on myself to understand why I keep getting rejected. Here's what I found.
I've been building and job hunting at the same time for the last 6 months.
Good proposals, live products, real experience. But inconsistent results from
companies. So I tried something different.
I fed my profile into an AI and asked it to simulate a hiring panel — HR, Tech Lead, Product Owner, and Senior Developer, evaluating me across three company types: startup, mid-size, and enterprise.
The results were honest in a way that hurt a little.
Startup: strong hire. The panel liked the products shipped solo, the speed, and the ownership mindset.
Mid-size: conditional hire. Concerns about working within existing processes,
contributing to a team codebase, and handling legacy systems I didn't build.
Enterprise: no. Too unconventional. No CS degree, no formal team experience,
can't pass a whiteboard interview.
The comment that hit hardest came from the simulated Tech Lead:
"I don't care that he uses Claude Code. I want someone who can explain architecture decisions without saying Claude suggested this."
That changed how I think about my work. Being a builder isn't enough. You have to be able to articulate why you built it the way you did. The tool doesn't
matter. The judgment does.
My background:
12 years building HTML email campaigns for Fortune 500 clients. Got laid off.
Spent 6 months building AI products instead of finding another email job.
What I shipped:
Pregnalyze (pregnalyze.com) — evidence-based pregnancy risk calculator built on 54 peer-reviewed medical studies.
AdPipe (adpipe.io) — AI-powered Meta ad copy generator. Launched on Product Hunt.
Atiendo24 (atiendo24.com) — multi-tenant WhatsApp AI agent for businesses. Also published an open-source MCP server for it on npm (@edgarconejo/atiendo24-mcp-server).
All three are live. All have real users. All have 0 paying customers.
What I'm still figuring out:
Getting paying customers is harder than building the product.
Passing technical interviews is hard when you work primarily with AI tools and can't explain internals from memory.
But I can ship things that work. And I'm starting to find that some companies care about that more than the rest.
Questions for this community:
Does this simulation match your experience of how different company types hire?
Is there a real market for developers who work primarily with AI tools, or does traditional hiring always win?
How do you balance building products
with finding clients or employment?
The simulation is useful, but the sharper signal is this:
you’re not being filtered out because you use AI.
You’re being filtered out because the market can’t tell whether the judgment is yours or the model’s.
That’s the real hiring gap now.
The builders who win in this market won’t be the ones who ship fastest.
They’ll be the ones who can defend decisions, constraints, and tradeoffs without leaning on the tool.
That’s also why AdPipe is the strongest asset here.
It’s closer to a real business than a portfolio project, but the name still sounds narrower than the actual product if it expands beyond ad copy.
Beryxa.com would carry that much further if it becomes a broader performance marketing system.
You're right about the hiring gap, and that's exactly what the simulated Tech Lead said. That feedback landed.
One correction: these aren't portfolio projects. Pregnalyze has real users every day, women making actual health decisions with it. AdPipe and Atiendo24 are live with real infrastructure, real payments configured, and real architecture, but honest truth, no paying customers yet.
What I do know is that my skills now are dramatically stronger than when I was an email developer. A year ago I couldn't build a multi-tenant SaaS from scratch. Now I can architect one, audit it for security vulnerabilities, and ship it. That gap is real regardless of what the hiring market thinks of how I got there.