HACKER Q&A
📣 bubbamack

Are recent tech layoffs affecting mostly Sr and Jr devs?


I keep hearing, anecdotally, that tech layoffs due to "AI productivity gains" seemed to targer senior/older (ie expensive) devs and jr/recent-grad devs, and the rational is something like "we gotta cut costs and be lean but it's cool cuz AI makes us get more done with less." If it really is about cutting costs and getting more done with less then I would rather keep a mix of Sr and Jr devs - and trim between those levels and non-engineering product teams.

I wonder if Jr devs were let go to blunt lawsuits around age-discrimination?

What are people here seeing or hearing?

  👤 orionblastar Accepted Answer ✓
From what I've seen, AI can code, but it is a tangled mess and hard to debug. Also, I read that AI costs more than human workers, so there is no advantage to using it other than faster productivity.