What Happened to All the Magento Developer Jobs?

Does it seem Magento developer roles have disappeared? Are you just being ghosted by recruiters on LinkedIn? Are you no longer making the same connections that you once were even earlier this year? If landing a Magento developer job just feels impossible right now, I'll give you the inside scoop of what's happening. And at the end of the video I'll give you some personal tips that will guide you through getting through this difficult time in the job market. Hey everyone, My name is Mark Schust, a Magento teacher at M Academy, and I've been a Magento developer for over a decade now. So I've seen this market and I want to give you my perspectives as to what's been going on recently in the market. Many Magento developers have been reaching out to me lately, asking where have all the Magento developer jobs gone? You may be one of them and are feeling just uncertain or frustrated about the lack of opportunities in the market right now. The downturn in Magento job postings over this last year has been pretty noticeable, and I want to take a few minutes to share my thoughts on the current landscape and sort of give you my perspective and leave you some actionable tips. Tips to make it through there's been no question that we've seen a decrease in Magento developer jobs lately, but it's important to note that this trend is not isolated just to Magento. It really reflects an overall downturn affecting the broader tech industry as well. The general economic climate and budget cycles also seem to be two of the biggest factors driving the market right now. Inflation doesn't really seem to be stopping, and with lingering talks of a recession, many companies are just being cautious and conservative about their plans of hiring anyone right now. Tech has been affected much more heavily than some other markets, which started in March when Facebook announced that they will be eliminating over 10,000 positions. Many other tech companies followed suit, leading to the entire market being affected. And if we even rewind a bit further, you may even say that this techcrunch started when Elon removed over 5,000 positions when he took over Twitter. Granted, there were other aspects at play there, but the overall goal was pretty much to focus on efficiency and cutting out bloat, a pattern that many other tech companies just want to follow suit with. But while some agencies and merchants using Magento have put hiring on hold, others have continued to expand their teams despite the current environment. There are still so many positive indicators for Magento. I just came back from Meet Magento in New York City and the Athena enthusiasm there was absolutely mind blowing. Magento is still so incredibly strong and I've been overall very positive about Magento, but my recent experience there just blew my expectations out of the water. The energy at the conference was palpable and there didn't seem to be really many sad faces at the event. In fact, I'm coming away with an even more positive outlook than the one I had before the conference, and it's really just a testament to the strong Magento community. Let's also remember that E Commerce is in an extremely long trend up upwards and Magento will continue to ride this wave and benefit from this as more and more stores just continue to come online. If we look at the stats, Magento still powers over 100,000 sites globally, which is an extremely large market share, and while it did lose some of those upward facing trajectories, it's held in the lower market for all of these years. Adobe moving their focus to the top of the market seems to be paying off as they are not only holding their position, but continuing to grow their enterprise market share. I think it's incredibly smart that Adobe chose to focus on enterprise because Shopify absolutely tore through the lower level market and completely owns that now. But let's also remember that while their share in the mid level market did drop, they still really have no competition. No offense to these other platforms as they all have their place in the market, but if you really want to build a highly customized storefront, are you really going to choose something like WooCommerce, Prestashop or OpenCart? And while other options are available such as BigCommerce and Shopware, they are growing at a pretty slow pace and are really failing to take any major market share away from Magento and Adobe Commerce. Before I give my developer crowd some advice on how to make it through this market, let's go over my outlook for the next year. Although the job market remains pretty sluggish at the moment, I expect Magento hiring to really bounce back in the start of 2024 as economic conditions improve. Remember also that new budget cycles kick off in January when everyone's PNL resets, so this will really open up some fresh opportunities for Magento developers. I'm also forecasting that these positions will come from particularly strong companies too, as the economy will probably not be completely out of the weeds by then, but this is going to be a great time for companies to invest in their growth and snatch up available talent that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise. While there may be a lingering recession in 2024. Magenta's weathered these downturns before and continues to dominate in the enterprise space of E commerce. There are also so many interesting initiatives on the way from Adobe such App Builder and the vibrant Magento community is breathing fresh air into all of these lower, mid and upper market spaces with projects such as Fuva, which drastically cut down the time to market for Magento projects and create great developer experiences. If you like this video so far, remember to tap that like button to help spread the word to other Magento developers. I appreciate it. So if you are a developer in this space looking for a position in this job market, here's my advice. Focus your energy on expanding your skills rather than abandoning Magento for other tech stacks. Especially if you want to remain in the E commerce space. With Magento being so flexible, extensible and having little to no competition, its place in the market isn't going anywhere and I'm living this mantra as I'm 100% invested in Magento and don't create training courses for any other platform at the moment. Consider investing your time to learn additional Magento backend and front end skills or try focusing on more high demand roles that seem to be less affected by the market such as solution architecture positions. Soft skills are also so important and most developers are just completely lacking in this area. I'd recommend taking a soft skills course on Udemy or skillshare to help better interact with other team members and even clients. This includes things like how to talk to people without coming across as brash or knowing how to navigate the politics of an office job. Companies are looking far beyond your resume and also want someone that jives with their company culture. A while back when I was developing full time, I stepped a bit outside of my introverted shell and worked really hard on improving my communication skills, conversing with my team and sitting in on calls with clients. And let me tell you, being able to properly communicate my thoughts and ideas to the team was an absolute game changer for my career and being able to communicate with clients completely opened up a new opportunity for me to become an independent freelancer which eventually provide me with the time and opportunity to start my own business. English is the language of the tech world, so if you aren't a fluent speaker or have a strong dialect or accent, improving your English speaking skills can have a giant impact on your ability to find Magento jobs or really any developer job in general. Since English directly impacts your ability to communicate, this investment pays off tenfold and also goes well beyond your current search for a job in this market. So many developers are focused purely on coding, but what companies are really looking for are well rounded individuals who can not only code, but be able to fluently communicate with their team and fit in with their company. What they're really looking for is a hard working friend who does what they say they are going to do, is responsible and caring to other members of their team, and won't throw a wrench into their team dynamics. Is that really too much to ask? And if you don't have much experience with Magento and want to land that awesome Magento developer job once it pops up, you'll probably want to check out this video next.