After the rapid growth of the tech market during COVID, when the demand for developers increases, the recent decline in demand was unpredictable. Several factors are responsible for this. After the shock of COVID and the recession, the rapid growth of AI tools, especially for developers, along with the strong trend of optimization and cost-cutting, are key reasons for this. It is not just a trend; it is our new reality. If you want to be a developer, it is not enough to just desire it; you must compete for your place. If you want to advance as a career leader, you should not just grow as a specialist; you must do and demonstrate more. You should change your way of growing and think differently.
I found a cool diagram that shows developers’ competence and their value in the current reality. I don’t know what data it is base on, but it matches my feelings. Hard skills are just foundation and the minimum requirement for any developer. Being a smart developer and knowing a lot of technical skills isn’t a limitation to growth as a developer. Now, you have access to that data through many AI tools. To do something outside your domain, you don’t need solid expertise; you just need basic knowledge, and with a broad set of tools, you can solve almost any problem. However, you should know how to use the tools.
How can you be more competitive in the current market and add value to your expertise? I have several ideas and insights relevant to the current moment. I am following them as I plan my growth as a specialist.
Grow your own developer brand.
Your expertise is a product that you sell to the employer. The value of this product is more visible when you work as a freelancer, and your portfolio is a tool to find good projects. At a time when many developers are looking for jobs and the number of open vacancies is low, it is crucial to be visible and recognizable among many similar, well-crafted CVs. How can you become more visible in this situation? Building your own developer brand is one solution.
What is a developer brand? In my opinion, it is your visibility as a developer beyond your CV. If you haven’t done anything in this direction, your visibility isn’t broader than a short text in the CV. You can check the value of your own visibility just by googling your name. I’m sure most of the link will point to different social media platforms if you are active on them. What about other materials that can present you as a developer? How many references are there on presentations, YouTube videos, or blog posts? Do you have your own blog? What about your reputation inside the local community that doesn’t rely on links?
All of these are key components of a developer’s brand and visibility. At the same time, it is not an MVP or a small product that you can build in a month. It is an idea or goal that you keep in mind and align your activities with.
Be Pro And Active
This idea is tightly connected with developing one’s own brand, but is more focused on actions and communication with the community. You should not just be a consumer of content but also contribute by creating something in response, making yourself more visible.
To be active means doing something that is greater than zero. Why is it important? Because anything greater than zero can produce a result, increase revenue, or cause an unexpected combination of circumstances in the future. What counts as an action? It can be anything: writing a comment on a podcast you listened to, providing feedback or asking questions, creating an issue with a description of a problem or a suggestion, or event asking questions at an in-person technical meeting. Other activities depend on your environment: participating or volunteering at a conference, writing articles, or creating content for a media platform. All of this acts like throwing stones into a pound; it causes waves on the surface of the water that can eventually multiply into something bigger.
Equally important is being a professional in a specific area. Firstly, you should focus on your main role and strive to be an expert in it. Activity in this area should be a primary goal.
Study AI
AI is a hot topic right now, and you should study its main concepts to stay relevant. This doesn’t mean you should completely switch your focus, but you should be familiar with it. In the near future, we will work not only on coloring buttons but also on integration of LLMs into our codebase. I remember an interesting presentation by a developer from Google Keyboard. He presented different ways they integrate new features with AI into keyboard application.
AI isn’t just about chat and image generation; it is much broader, and we, as developers, should know how it works. There is a lot of material on this topic. I am currently taking a course on AI agents on Hugging Face. The first part contains a good introduction to the topic.
Alongside AI tools available for developers, there are many resources you can use to build and prototype your own ideas. Now, you don’t need detailed knowledge of backend development to use models in a mobile application. You can use a serverless solution to integrate models. One option is Firebase, and another is Google AI Studio, both of which make this process especially easy.
Care About Value
The last but not the least point for growth and change is the relation to value. The value of any action or activity you do is important. This applies to all actions, whether personal or work-related activities. You should care about the value you will get as a result.
This seems obvious, but we often forget about it and focus only on the process. In software development, this is very valuable: the final result for customers and users is more important than just using modern frameworks and caring about perfectionism in the codebase. More important is thinking about the result you deliver than just completing the task in Jira. Maybe it comes with experience when you understand the value of time and the importance of not how you do something, but what you achieve as a result.
Thinking about the result is important in personal life too. Doing something efficiently or just caring about it is like doing something on a deeper level. This soft skill helps you to be more preferable to an employer, especially if he is the owner of a product or a startup, where results matter.
Conclusion
I like comparing the growth of AI to the invention of the book printing in medieval times. The handwriting of books, as well as the people who did this, became extinct in the following century. The honored position of the hand writer was replaced by the average role of a book printer in a small printing workshop. I feel the situation in the market develops in the same manner, and the role of the developer shift in the direction of a regular factory worker.
We cannot change this trend, but we can be more competitive, skilled, and creative. All of these suggestions are obvious, but they require effort and determination to implement. The current situation is challenging, and we should work hard if we want to move forward, grow as developers, and reach our goals.
You can find me in X, GitHub, medium or LinkedIn. Thanks for your time and see you in next post.
Top comments (0)