JS Pulse #3
Oracle just fired 30,000 people. Meta cut hundreds more and plans thousands. Atlassian wiped 10% of its staff. Epic Games dropped 1,000 engineers. In total, Q1 2026 saw almost 60,000 tech layoffs, up 51% from Q1 2025. The explanation every company gives is the same: AI.
But here is the part they do not say out loud. Most of these companies are not cutting JavaScript developers. They are cutting middle management, coordination roles, and positions that AI agents now handle. Oracle needs fewer project managers because AI schedules the work. Meta needs fewer content moderators because AI does the moderation. But all of them still need people who build the products that users actually touch. If you write JavaScript, your job is not the one being automated. Your manager's job might be.
Welcome back to JS Pulse. I'm Zamir, founder of jsgurujobs.com. Here is what actually mattered in the JavaScript world over the last two weeks.
THE NUMBER: 60,000
That is how many tech workers lost their jobs in Q1 2026 alone. 51% more than Q1 2025. The pattern is clear: companies overhired in 2021, corrected in 2023, and are now using AI as the reason for a second round of cuts. But if you look at the actual roles being eliminated, it is not engineering. It is everything around engineering. The developers who survive this wave are the ones who ship products, not the ones who attend meetings about shipping products.
THE BIG STORY: Axios Got Hacked
On March 31, someone hijacked the npm account of an Axios maintainer and published two poisoned versions (1.14.1 and 0.30.4) that install a Remote Access Trojan on your machine. macOS, Windows, Linux. The malware steals SSH keys, AWS credentials, and cloud tokens. Then it deletes itself so you never know it happened.
Axios has 83 million weekly downloads. This is one of the most sophisticated supply chain attacks npm has ever seen.
What to do right now: check your package-lock.json for axios 1.14.1 or 0.30.4. If you find either, downgrade immediately to 1.14.0 or 0.30.3, delete node_modules, and rotate every credential on that machine.
I wrote a full breakdown of how the attack works, how to check if you are affected, and what to change in your projects to prevent this in the future.
Read the full Axios attack analysis here
THIS WEEK'S READ: TypeScript 6.0 Just Shipped
TypeScript 6.0 is out. This is the last version built in JavaScript. TypeScript 7.0, coming in months, will be rewritten in Go and compile 10x faster. But 6.0 is the release that matters right now because it changes your defaults: strict mode is on by default, the target is ES2025, and the module system defaults to ESM. Old tsconfig files will break.
If you have not updated yet, the migration guide in this article will save you hours.
Read the full TypeScript 6.0 guide
5 JOBS WORTH APPLYING TO
1. Senior Software Engineer, Frontend — Retell AI — USA — $215K–$290K
Voice AI startup reimagining call centers. React + TypeScript. One of the highest-paying frontend roles on the board right now.
Apply here
2. Frontend Engineer — Nango — Remote (USA, EU, LATAM) — $120K–$200K
YC W23 company building product integrations with AI. React + TypeScript. 250+ paying customers.
Apply here
3. Frontend Engineer — Stedi — Canada
Healthcare clearinghouse. React + Next.js + TypeScript. HIPAA-compliant systems at scale.
Apply here
4. Lead Front-End Engineer (UI/UX) — Bolt.new — Remote Worldwide
The team behind WebContainers and StackBlitz. React + TypeScript. Building the future of browser-based development.
Apply here
5. Frontend Engineer — Chess.com — Remote (Europe)
600+ person team, 100+ million users. Vue.js + TypeScript. If you play chess and write code, this is your dream job.
Apply here
Browse all 426 JavaScript jobs
TOOL OF THE WEEK: Pretext
Cheng Lou (ex-React team, ReasonML, Midjourney frontend) just dropped a tiny TypeScript library that measures and lays out text 500x faster than DOM. No CSS reflow. No browser measurement APIs. It was trained against real Chrome, Safari, and Firefox rendering and matches their output nearly 1:1.
Why this matters: if you build anything where text is performance-critical (chat applications, design tools, canvas rendering, virtual lists, magazine-style layouts), Pretext gives you pixel-accurate text measurement at speeds the browser cannot match. It runs at 120fps with hundreds of thousands of text boxes.
Fully TypeScript. Zero dependencies. Already endorsed by engineers at Vercel, Figma, Remix, and shadcn.
ALSO HAPPENING
Claude Code leaked its own source. On March 31, the full TypeScript source of Anthropic's Claude Code was found inside the npm package itself, including an internal "Undercover Mode" system designed to prevent exactly this kind of leak. The archive hit 1,100+ GitHub stars in hours.
NYT published "Coding After Coders." The New York Times ran a piece about how the developer profession has become "deeply strange." Senior engineers spend more time prompting AI agents than writing code. Some developers are leaving tech entirely. One ex-engineer now does welding and says she is happier.
React Paris 2026 happened. The conference ran March 26–27 in hybrid format. If you missed it, recordings should be available soon.
HIRING?
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That is it for JS Pulse #3. Next week: what the Axios attack aftermath looks like, how companies are changing their npm security practices, and whether the layoff pace is accelerating or slowing.
— Zamir
Founder, jsgurujobs.com
P.S. If this was useful, forward it to one developer friend. If it was not, hit reply and tell me what to change. I read every response.