Will the Developer Market be Oversaturated in 2025?

hey guys how you doing uncle Steph here so I got a question was put to me Stefan what's your opinion on the oversaturation of the dev Market due to yearly graduated software engineers and self-taught do you think there is still a demand for software Engineers good question I hear it all the time here's the actual answer based on my understanding of the whole Market anyway let's just jump into it all right short answer is don't worry about the software engineering Market there's not going to be a shortage what's happening now and I'm recording this October

1st wow it's October 1st 2024 so what's happening now is we're having anecdotally I haven't looked at the latest data but what we're happening is a downturn in the market in terms of hiring developers because of two things number one during the pandemic pandemic excuse me during the lockdowns a lot of tech companies were just hiring like crazy they were doing these um what's the term they used they were doing what some people would call defensive hires hiring anybody they could get their hands on in terms of coding Etc because they're worried but they wouldn't

be able to get their hands on the talent so they went through this crazy phase of hiring like crazy and now the dust has settled and they realize that they've over hired and now they're just trimming the fact they are adjusting for reality this is normal I've seen this cycle several times before so another aspect of this is during this frenzy hiring phase they were hiring people who weren't really that competent so a lot of the uh boot camp graduates a lot of people who did just a bunch of courses on udem and then copied

the projects and then presented those in their portfolios they were so worried about missing out on Talent they hired all these people so what's happened is they' they've calmed down it's like they've gotten gotten off the sauce they're no longer drunk and when you're not drunk you don't make stupid decisions so they had they had the publicly traded companies and all the tech companies they had coder beer goggles on coder beer goggles they were so desperate and like a drunk person they said oh that that that that coder looks amazing when you're drunk they look

amazing and then the next day you go I was drunk so that's what's happening right now they're just sobering up and uh they're realizing that they hired a bunch of people who weren't qualified to begin with and that's why you hear a lot of people are saying they're not hiring entrylevel devs anymore they weren't entry-level devs they were devs in who were still learning they didn't really know what they were doing you have to understand something when you're hiring uh developers when you're hiring any Talent really I'm telling you this from experience it's expensive to

bring on new Talent it costs the employer money not just in terms of your salary but in terms of training you up so that you are productive and I've cited articles and studies in other videos where the hiring managers the HR people say the number two thing they look for when they're hiring tech people is interpersonal skills professionalism that sort of thing uh yeah you got to be trained in that you got to be trained in that so this whole downturn that we're seeing if it's there for it's it's not really affecting the people who

have skill and talent it's affecting the people who probably needed a little bit more training before they got a job in the first place but if you look at all future projections in terms of where the market is going it's just positive for anybody who's technically inclin even in the age of AI anybody who tells you AI is going to replace coders and all this kind of stuff they they you can almost be certain that they're not professional developers they're not because anybody who knows anything about writing code in development that the coding part of

it the actual writing of the code the boilerplate code which thei can do and I encourage you to use it to do that it's just a part of the process it's just a part of the process you know especially in uh small SMB Small mediumsized Business Development where as a developer as a coder you're going to be wearing many hats so one day you may be working on the front end and you may be doing some python scripting to automate a server uh then another day you may be installing a WordPress uh install Etc and

so on it just your work is all over the place and so again all this type of decision making has to be done what libraries to choose what languages to choose uh what hosting company do I use this hosting do I have to go to VPS or do I do I need something like Azure which you probably don't or shared hosting just enough uh what are your requirements okay uh what do you need what features do you want these are all things that AI cannot do AI can assist you but cannot replace so I'm just

to end this aside with regards to AI don't worry about it embrace it use it learn to use it I have seen in the past technologies that had a far greater impact in terms of development that AI has to date and I don't see AI having for a long time the reason you hear about AI so much is because it it affects many Industries in a Marginal Way so in aggregate it's pretty powerful so what do I mean by that well you see AI affecting copywriters affecting uh robotics it's affecting uh accounting it's affecting software

development it's affecting uh video production it's affecting all kinds of Industries but they're not replacing anybody yet maybe copywriters to a certain extent um there may be a few Industries here and there that might be re where people will be replaced or be great reduction in number of people required I'm not too concerned about that especially when it comes to software development I say that AI is now making you 10 to 20% more productive as a software development as a software developer 10 to 20% more productive depending on the type of specialization that you do

so I would be using AI to write my queries cuz those can be a pain in a butt but an AI to maybe do the boilet plate code for some layouts but we've had templates for years as I said I've seen other technologies that predate AI but had a far far far far greater impact than AI uh number one page based web development paradigm shift this is something happened in the mid to late 90s they went from Cod Centric front end design to page based we're talking ASP classic ASP jsps Etc this is a total

change and it was a big game changer in terms of developer prod productivity I was one of the first in the world to adopt ASP was now called ASP classic and I've told this story before I took a an early social media app that another company spent over a year building with the traditional way of doing things Pearl CGI based development which was cold Centric I won't get into the details because this is old news it's history anyway ASP this new paradigm page based Paradigm what Microsoft invented by the way was so productive that I

was able to rebuild this social media platform which was pretty uh pretty comprehensive the previous company took over a year to build their prototype I was able to build it from scratch using ASP technology in 30 days and not because I was a great programmer it's just because the page based Paradigm replacing the old Paradigm was literally made me a thousand times more productive 10 times more productive right well more than that actually it took them a year it took me 30 days now of course it's easier to copy and reproduce an app but still

you see how hyperproductive that was another example I like to site is WordPress before WordPress all the magazine sites were done with HTML maybe with uh client side includes with apps like Dreamweaver um with PHP or JSP type of includes includes to reproduce like consistent items across the site but it was manual essentially so incomes the content Management Systems I remember them coming in in '95 96 and I remember at the time all the HTML web designers all the web designers I was going to say HTML nerds but all the web designers at the time

were freaking out that's the end of web design and development with content management system they were wrong it just changed the game it shifted uh what we did and how we did it and I welcome all these changes and I will say that the move from static site development magazine type or information site development to using content Management Systems like a WordPress or Drupal or juman or several others that was a much much bigger change to the web development uh landscape an AI has been or AI will be for foreseeable future so to conclude yes

right now there might be a reduction of jobs because they're just cleaning house as I said and uh they're not hiring people from Bad boot camps or from uh you know people who just learn on their own with no guidance and uh udemy courses and stuff as just normal so what you have to do if you're learning this stuff is I always tell people the same thing over and over again like in my my own mentoring program learn your fundamentals well start building real sites for people start taking on freelance contracts even do two or

two to three for free to get your hands dirty because when you build an actual project your understanding of development will just Skyrocket it will just to the Moon it will just go like you'll be amazed how much more you're going to learn so yeah problem is a lot of people have imposter syndrome a lot of people are nervous about jumping into the market the great thing about coding by the way unlike other Industries like the print industry if you make a mistake eh no big deal you fix it that's why we have IOS whatever

we got 14 now. 10456 whatever it is all those points those are sub versions of the software why do you have that colder mistakes developer error so don't sweat making bugs in uh your coding that's why you take on little projects for free nobody's heavily invested but you're learning a lot and uh you're going to that's how you're going to build your resume that's how you're going to get a job not by doing endless tutorials I could put out all kinds of tutorials and sell them but that's not good for you I have my base

stuff that I I teach the fundamentals and you head out there and you start building the real thing just like a boxer a fighter m per fighter and or a boxer how do they get good they get in the ring they fight all right I'm unle Stef I hope you found this video useful if you don't like my video give me two thumbs down not one but give me two show me how much you hate me if you think my hair is too long give me two thumbs down and last piece of advice just avoid

Ruby just avoid Ruby [Music]