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Twenty years of shipping some of the biggest games ever made. Credits on Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption, and L.A. Noire. And still, former Rockstar Games audio engineer Rob Carr says none of that is enough to reliably land a job right now.
When a two-decade resume stops being a differentiator
Carr sat down with Reece "Kiwi Talkz" Reilly for an interview where he broke down exactly how rough the current hiring climate has become for experienced developers. His situation is far from unique.
"It's not nice to lose your job at any particular point," Carr said, "but when there's literally thousands of people in the exact same situation, you find yourself in a position where it's no longer like... my 20-year tenure is no longer good enough for me to get a job whereas 5 years ago it was."
That's not a complaint about personal failings. That's a structural problem. Carr described applying for roles and being told his applications were solid, his experience checked out, and that the process had essentially come down to chance. "It's a toss of a coin at this point," he recalled being told by hiring managers.
Thirty-five people with the same resume
The core issue Carr identifies is saturation. Mass layoffs across the industry over the past two years have flooded the talent pool with senior developers who all carry comparable credits from comparable studios.
"I got 20 years industry experience, I've worked on some of the biggest titles in the world," Carr explained, "but there's 35 other guys with the exact same amount of experience and tenure and projects behind them as I've got."
That math is brutal. When a studio posts a single senior audio role and receives applications from dozens of people who have each shipped multiple AAA titles, the resume stops functioning as a filter. Hiring becomes, as Carr puts it, a coin flip.
The post-Covid hangover hitting hardest at the top
The broader context here is well-documented. The gaming boom that arrived with the pandemic gave studios the revenue and confidence to hire aggressively. Headcounts ballooned across the board, and experienced developers were in demand. That window has since closed hard.
Ubisoft's CEO acknowledged earlier this year that the company had spun up too many projects after anticipating "sustained demand that didn't fully materialize" post-Covid. That pattern repeated across the industry, and the correction has been severe. Studios that expanded rapidly are now operating leaner, and the people let go in that process are competing with each other for a shrinking number of open roles.
Carr's situation sits at the intersection of two uncomfortable realities: the industry over-hired during a boom, and now the developers who built the games that defined a generation are waiting on callbacks.
What this means for the people who built the games you love
For players, the names in a game's credits are easy to scroll past. But those credits represent careers, and right now a significant number of the people behind titles like GTA 5 are navigating a job market that has no reliable mechanism for rewarding experience at scale.
Carr's response has been to go independent, build his own project, and document the experience publicly. That path is not available to everyone, and it does not fix the structural problem he described.
The industry is heading into a period where GTA 6 and a handful of other massive releases will generate enormous revenue for a small number of publishers. Whether that translates into rehiring the experienced talent currently sitting on the sidelines is a question the next 12 months will start to answer. Make sure to check out more:
