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Watercooler

Understanding if a market is oversaturated and how to stand out in such a market.

Is the market oversaturated?

I’d say in certain positions and countries yes, in others not so much.
Generally, it’s tough for entry-level frontend developers in high-wage countries like the USA.
A lot of things factor into that.
<ol>
<li>
the position:
Everyone from every kind of bootcamp does Javascript nowadays. So anything involving Javascript is saturated because every rookie learns Javascript as their default language.
</li>
<li>
the country:
Since COVID, companies have gone full-remote and no longer require engineers to be in the same country the company is from, this opens the door for them to hire people remotely in other continents where the expected wages are far lower than what they’d need to pay you for the same work.
</li>
<li>
the economy and layoffs:
The economy is in full-blown recession and VCs don’t have as much willingness to throw money wildly at random Javascript startups anymore, many of them have shut down and laid off thousands, these are now experienced engineers looking for work and competing with the entry-level folks looking to get their foot in the door.
</li>
</ol>
If you got experience you’re relatively safe, if you got uncommon skills, you’re safe and if you don’t but are from a relatively low-wage country compared to the USA and Western Europe (Germany, France etc) you’re also probably safe.
For the others there’s a real extinction event going on out there and yes it’s absolutely wild how many people are getting laid off or finding themselves graduating and being completely unable to get even unpaid internships let alone full-time jobs coding.

There’s an over saturation for the “easy”, entry level stuff. If you’re a “website builder” you’re pretty much screwed. plain vanilla “fullstack” is also over saturated. Anyone can do Python/Djnago and React, or Express and React or simply mobile apps. There are 1,000 U.S. applicants for each “full stack” opening right now. What the market really needs now is GOOD AI/Gen-AI/ML folks – I’m not talking about those googled about it or successfully went through a “hello world” example. Those i demand are those who understand the math behind AI. Math has been a requirement to enter the “programming” field decades ago and then discarded with the dot-com boom. Website builders don’t need math. simple applications don’t require math. But AI/ML is built on math. The mathematicians, physicists and data-scientists with advanced degrees and deep understanding of the internals of AI are now in demand. This is their time. Anyone else is pretty much a dime a dozen. Not a palatable truth if your main skills are HTML, JS and CSS.

seems tough days for many developers, I saw some highly skilled laid off like Kylie Simpson (author of YDKJS) and his journey trying to find a new job, I am concerned about this situation

The market is OVERSATURATED for PROGRAMMERS not for software engineers.

this one really ramble the wasp nest :)))