George Dover spent almost two years applying for jobs, submitting roughly 400 applications, before landing a software engineering role focused on artificial intelligence.
The Beaverton resident's path from layoff to re-employment tracks the wave of tech job losses that has hit Washington County's biggest employers.
Dover, a software engineer with six years of experience, was laid off from Intuit Mailchimp in late 2024. He became a substitute kindergarten teacher while searching for new roles, a period he described to The Guardian as disorienting.
"It's very difficult to let go of something that was a large part of your personality for a good number of years," Dover said. "What else is there for me?"
Rather than abandon tech, Dover taught himself to work alongside AI. He used AI tools to generate code for websites, then evaluated the output for errors, redundancies, bugs, and visual glitches.
He described the process as uneven: sometimes AI saved time, other times it sent him down rabbit holes that took longer than writing the code himself.
The retraining worked. Dover landed his new AI-focused engineering job by mid-2026, according to a Guardian profile published July 12.
Tech layoffs across Washington County
Dover's experience mirrors a broader pattern in the region. Nike cut 740 employees at its Beaverton global headquarters in spring 2024, expecting $2 billion in cost savings.
In April 2026, the company announced plans to eliminate approximately 1,400 more positions worldwide in its Global Operations division, with the majority of cuts hitting technology roles, according to a staff memo from Nike Chief Operating Officer Venkatesh Alagirisamy.
Nike is consolidating its tech operations around its Beaverton headquarters and the Nike India Technology Center.
Intel laid off nearly 2,400 Oregon workers in July 2025, one of the largest layoffs in state history. Intel's Hillsboro manufacturing campus lost 1,521 workers that year alone, according to The Oregonian.
Nationally, more than 600,000 U.S. tech workers have lost their jobs since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, according to the layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi.
The unemployment rate for computer science graduates rose to 7% in 2024, and tech job postings on Indeed dropped 36% between 2020 and 2025.
What skills matter now
Bouke Klein Teeselink, an assistant professor of economics at King's College London, told The Guardian that "the skill of writing code is over" and that success now depends on how well engineers use AI tools.
Ethan Mollick, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said the value has moved away from writing large volumes of code toward defining problems, designing systems, and directing AI effectively.
Dover's own experience complicates the clean-break narrative. His retraining still required deep coding knowledge to catch the errors AI produced. Rigorously testing AI-generated code, he found, mattered more than producing it.
His new role reflects that shift.
