How the engineering market changed since 2006

and how to prepare for the future

The last five years have been wild. We have had a pandemic, a working-from-home bubble that burst into layoffs, and a looming recession. A lot has happened in a short time.

The market never sleeps and ever changes.

Today, I will show you how the Software Engineering market has changed over the last 20 years, where I see it now, and what I expect is coming our way.

Before we begin

Together with

Michał Poczwardowski

,

Yordan Ivanov 📈

and

Samuel Kollát

we wanted to create something more than posting on LinkedIn or weekly newsletter.

We’ve created a Discord Community for everybody to hang out and learn together.

Come and get your questions answered, and join meetups and events. Or organise your own.

Everybody is welcome

The early 2000s

The golden era for self-starters like me.

I learned to code simple websites and Pascal in mid-school. The only person I knew who could code then was my uncle, a teacher, not a coder. Being a computer nerd wasn’t winning popularity contests as well.

Software Engineering was a basement discipline. The IT Crowd makes fun of it, but it’s not far from the truth. Before Software was cool, we sat at home for hours, read code, and dressed in checker shirts.

OG engineers were cool before hipsters.

2006

The first time I made a career choice.

To give you context—I lived in a small-ish town in the south of Poland. I had a difficult family situation at the time and little to no money. I couldn’t afford free college level of poor.

This removed Java from the list because big corporations required college. I was a mid-level in Delphi, but the language was dying, so that was also off the table. What intrigued me was the “Web” and how PHP was growing in popularity.

I had to take any job I could because of my food addiction, but I was set on becoming a web developer.

2011

It took me 5 years of learning after hours to land my first full-time gig.

I made many mistakes in the process. I worked a few crap jobs, and I did work with the failed idea of a news site. Then, in late August, I got an offer to work for free to prove I know PHP as well as I say I do.

By this time, I had just under 10 years of coding experience. There weren’t many people with that experience at the time. I finished the week of work early, and I had Friday to rest.

It was hard to find the first company, but getting through wasn’t a problem.

2020

I moved to London, switched to Java and then the pandemic hit.

It didn’t change my career, but it did change the market. Over the past decade, software has left the basement, and people have seen the success of Facebook and Google. Everybody wanted to build a social network and learn about the great software engineering careers that exist.

Working from home, the great salary and the industry's openness got everybody on the bandwagon. Instead of becoming a lawyer or doctor, everybody has software engineering in their sights. The pandemic kept us all at home with plenty of spare time, and everybody started learning.

Bootcamps made a lot of money on the outdated promise.

Today

It worked until people were spending pandemic support money.

During the pandemic, Tech hired many people. As markets grew, so did the teams. Until the government money ran out, and we entered the era of layoffs we’re in today.

We have an oversupply of developers, with millions switching careers or entering the market after college. We have the market on the edge of recession, and corporate spending and VC funds are growing cautious about how they spend their money. Businesses realise code isn’t the silver bullet and expect more from developers before hiring them.

Today, communication skills are close to saturation.

6 years earlier, I could find a job under a week, even after switching from PHP to Java. I was a terrible communicator back then. It didn’t stop anybody from hiring me because strong code and system design skills were important for growth.

Today, growth is on hold. Every company looks for ways to optimise their teams and eliminate everything that slows them down. Elon has proven this by firing most of Twitter's staff and keeping the platform running as it was.

The focus shifted to efficiency, and communication was the greatest leverage when coding skills became a commodity.

Into the future

Engineering left the basements and can communicate; there is no way back.

There won’t be less developers. Today’s engineers will get better and better over time. I don’t see the market speeding up any time soon.

You may shrink hearing that. It’s tough, but every problem brings an opportunity. With coding and communication skills becoming the new baseline, there are other areas you can explore to stand out. I call it adjacent skills.

What you’re interested in beyond code will make you stand out in the market.

The three areas I can see you can win today as a software engineer are domain, business and deep understanding of code.

1. Domain

I see it in FinTech today—you need FInTech knowledge to land a job.

I expect other industries to follow soon. When hiring managers realise that they can skip part of the onboarding by hiring people who have already worked with a similar tech stack and solved similar problems, they will prioritise those with experience.

You can get ahead by focusing on the problems you’re solving today rather than code.

2. Business

Organisations look for devs who understand the big picture.

Every business's primary goal is to make money. Developers who understand how their work impacts revenue or lowers costs are always needed. This is the deepest level of alignment.

The best place to start is reading Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman to learn all the basic terms and mechanics of business.

3. Deep understanding of code

My project manager knows JavaScript and Python, and the engineering bar is rising.

As an engineer, you will need to have a deeper knowledge of the technology than creating a CRUD and saving data in a database. Your code will need to get better, and you’ll need to know why it’s better. Saying that someone on the internet said it’s the best way won’t cut it.

To go beyond the basics, learn how the languages, libraries and frameworks work under the hood.

Is Software Engineering doomed?

It may feel that way looking at today’s market.

I don’t think it’s “doomed”, but changing. The software industry is becoming a teenager. Developers have left the basements and are now in the spotlight of the mainstream.

Neither you nor I can change it, but we can observe and adapt because the market never sleeps.

PS

If you are a software engineer and want to start your career in finance.

I’m creating a FinTech Fundamentals course to get you started.

Join the waitlist, and I’ll keep you updated about the launch