[asdasfasdfasdf]

Yeah this is it in my experience. It looks like they're optimizing for age, but they're really optimizing for cost and ageism is a side-effect.

I've seen this happen at almost every job I've had: Senior engineer with 10+ years experience works 40-50 hours a week and gets laid off. Senior engineer is opinionated about how things are implemented and can come across as "difficult." Two junior engineers are hired for about the same cost and are pushed to 60+ hours a week. They'll do literally anything you tell them to. Non-engineer management sees a win but then eventually gets mad about codebase issues like it's unrelated, and end up churning through juniors trying to fix it.

Another alternative is outsourcing of course, in which you can end up with a small team for the short-term cost of one senior engineer... and a lot of the same problems with the junior route.

It feels like one of those risk problems where people are happy about the short-term gain but fail to look far enough ahead to see the long-term issues.

[state_less]

Some anecdata to add to the case.

My first job out of school was as a startup founder (10% ownership) where our new CEO was a sales guy from a healthcare company. Great at raising money, but no deep technical knowledge. We were building a music search recommender using mfcc spectrograms and ML. He decided to fire all the engineers and hire out to cheap overseas hotspot. We weren't especially expensive, being young guys, but nevertheless you could get 3 for 1 overseas...

The company shut down a few months after the local engineers left.

[Avicebron]

I would argue that the entire corporate structure is designed like this. I've seen it in every industry I have worked in, it's a quarter by quarter slog to see some decrease in cost and increase in profit.

It's part of reason that I feel like everyone is looking for that fabled "exit" and building a sustainable business just doesn't really exist..

[marktangotango]

> Two junior engineers are hired for about the same cost and are pushed to 60+ hours a week. They'll do literally anything you tell them to. Non-engineer management sees a win but then eventually gets mad about codebase issues like it's unrelated

The “lord of flies” cultures these teams become can be astoundingly horrible and toxic. Imagine a lot inexperienced people trying to one up each other, no one providing any direction whatsoever. I happily left one such team not long ago!