Ask HN: Are recent tech layoffs affecting mostly Sr and Jr devs?

Posted by bubbamack on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @07:57PM
from the ask-hn dept.

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?

( 4 comments | 3 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Are recent tech layoffs affecting mostly Sr and J... by orionblastar on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @08:05PM (#48287695)

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Are recent tech layoffs affecting mostly Sr and J... by bubbamack on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @08:47PM (#48288035)

I think companies are starting to realize that big AI companies were partially subsidizing the costs and that it is more expensive than they realized. They will probably start to monitor token usage.

I use AI for a lot of coding and it takes effort and experience to reduce some of the excess cruft it likes to add.

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Re:Ask HN: Are recent tech layoffs affecting mostly Sr and J... by steveBK123 on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @08:59PM (#48288107)

The cost/ROI vs productivity thing I see on my team / hear from others is mostly that people are leveraging LLM code to do lower value work they previously never would have done. Lots of "I finally improved my test coverage" and "so I finally got to that ticket thats been in the backlog 2 years" and "I finally did that big refactor" and "I spent 2 weeks on the codebase making it easier for LLM to understand it" kind of stuff.

I have heard fewer anecdotes from people I know of the form "I do my job faster, shipping features 50% faster using LLMs". I think this is a project lifecycle thing too. An existing 5 year old project with users, stakeholders, product team, etc probably is going to null out any coding speed up.

I recall a very "agile" team I was on where we met with users weekly to get their requests, demo the changes made, and usually half the meeting was them changing their mind about what they said last week. I don't think delivering features 2x faster and meeting twice a week would have worked.

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Re:Ask HN: Are recent tech layoffs affecting mostly Sr and J... by orionblastar on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @01:04AM (#48289886)

https://youtu.be/WuhAaMSXD9A AI costs more than using Humans. In 2030, they might have lower-cost tokens.

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