The tech market is tough. Here's what actually matters.

The situation Layoffs, an influx of new devs, and AI getting more capable every month. The market is genuinely harder than it was a few years ago — both at entry level and senior. Supply is up, so the average developer's value is down. That's just supply and demand. But the average developer is not you. Here's why it's not as grim as it looks. Competence still wins The market isn't homogeneous. Two developers with the same title and years of experience can be worlds apart in actual ability. What separates them: 1. Problem-solving over knowledge accumulation The developer who knows three frameworks but can't think through an unfamiliar problem is less valuable than the one with strong fundamentals who can adapt fast. Protocols, concurrency, system design, debugging, fixing and shipping under pressure — these transfer across stacks. Knowing by heart a specific library or framework doesn't. A concrete example: migrating a microservice from Java to Go. A developer who's never touched Java