The US is heading form record low unemployment to depression era 20% unemployment. Nobody knows just how bad it will (can) get just yet, but it keeps getting worse. This will result in a major economic contraction. A recession is all but guaranteed and possibly a depression.

One area that will be hard hit is corporate software development. It is extremely unproductive and inefficient. Inefficiency is allowed when the economy is strong because there was a perceived shortage of talent and it is easier to hire talent than train talent. Without any kind of standing licensing or certification standard in place there is no uniform definition of competence and so the hiring market was largely candidate driven.

That is done. Almost no business will be profitable this year and many will fail through the process of market correction. Business can no longer afford to hire ineffective software developers.

As a long time web developer I have been astonished at the level of allowed ineffectiveness of web development practices. Essentially, almost nobody knows what they are doing or how the technology works without extensive help, typically through developer friendly software tools.

As the economy contracts, business fail, and hiring all but stops employers will be forced to make tough decisions in order to keep the lights on. Before established employers simply had to exercise competitive market pressure to be successful. Internal software development was just an internal cost of doing business and expenses are easy to justify if the business is cash flow positive. When the economy suddenly fails like never before and nobody is cash flow positive everything is open to critical review. Now businesses will be forced to consider how essential this internal software development is to their bottom line. If they absolutely cannot afford to live without it they will have to justify it as an essential operating expense. That line of thinking will roll down to each individual employee.

The days of hiring 10 developers to monkey patch a giant application around a giant framework that does most of your job for you is over. Instead employers will be forced to justify spending any money on writing software, budgets will shrink, and developers will be forced to justify their continued employment in competition with their peers. This will result in many unemployed software developers competing for employment in a market of a very few openings. Each open position will be under greater market pressure to perform more efficiently to the business, to justify its existence financially.

Before, when the economy was strong, talented and highly productive developers were rare and hiring top talent was expensive. Many employers would settle on the average developer in the middle of the bell curve because that would be perceived as lower risk and lower expense. You get what you pay for in that talent was sacrificed to lower financial risks of hiring and so you are now staffed by less productive people with less productive business practices. When there are suddenly very few software developer positions left and each developer is more directly connected to the financial health of their employers the nature and definition of performance will change.