Referring to volcanic activity in Iceland that's had regular magma activity and eruptions every month since November 2024:
You can estimate the likelihood of harm happening and then take steps to make that harm less likely.
- Could lava flow over the town or the power plant? Yes.
- Is it possible to make the lava less likely to destroy the town or other infrastructure? Again, yes.
- Do you need to know exactly what will happen – where and when – to build that protective infrastructure? No, you don’t.
So we build massive earth walls and hope for the best. Sometimes they work and divert the lava flow away from the town and power plant. Sometimes they don’t hold. Sometimes the eruption happens inside the barrier, bypassing it completely.
And why I tagged this as potential reference or post to cite when writing about the Metaphoric Method:
We can try to apply the same principles to figure out where we stand, as workers or employers, in the larger web developer job market.
We can figure out the broad range of possibilities: worst and best case scenarios.
We can then estimate what measures we can take to minimise the impact of potential disaster on our own lives and work.
The last time employment in tech was this bad, in the early 2000s, I dealt with it by simply opting out. “Fuck it, I’m doing a PhD”, and I just didn’t participate in the developer job market for four years.
The software developer job market today looks at least as bad as it did in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse.
The state of the job market today:
- The stock market loves job cuts
- Activist investors see it as an opportunity to lower developer compensation
- Management believes they can replace most of these employees with LLM-based automation
Because the effect LLMs have on the job market is down to manager world-view not the level or quality of the innovation.
Most websites are buggy, inaccessible, and broken.
I’m a freelance web developer with an ebook business on the side. I’ve been making websites since the late nineties and have managed to outlast several bubbles. But normally the bubbles themselves came with decent job markets. Our current situation where we have simultaneously a funding bubble and a poor job market is, in my experience, unique, certainly unique enough for me to try to look closer at what’s happening.
So, what should we do?
- Unionise
- Diversify your skills
- Some of us could take the opportunity to make products
URL: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-one-about-the-web-developer-job-market/