The Web Dev Saturation is Real: How to Pivot Your Career in a Post-AI Market
· 카테고리: thoughts
The Web Dev Saturation is Real: How to Pivot Your Career in a Post-AI Market
Most of the CSE graduates are having a hard time finding jobs in their field, essentially screaming into the void:
“God, I spent 4 years and $150k on a CSE degree, and the only job I can get is like, welcome to McDonald’s, do you want fries with that?”
Yes, it is actually harsh. In 2026, getting a job in the CSE field—especially in web development—feels like competing in a decathlon against an Olympic champion.
The thing is, there are so many CSE graduates that want to work in web development, and the market is already saturated. So if you’ve prepared a lot and still can’t get a job in web development, it’s not your fault.
This is not a special moment in the web development field. If you take a glance at history, you will see that this is not the first time the market has been overcrowded.
1. Deja Vu: The 2000s Dot-Com Bubble
Let’s go back to the 2000s. The so-called dot-com bubble occurred around 2000–2001.
At the time, web developers were effectively the monarchs of the tech world. Every company wanted a website, and many were willing to pay top dollar for talented web developers. Even knowing basic HTML and JavaScript was enough to land a job. Companies were so desperate that if you could make a button change color on click, you were hired.
It is quite astonishing, right? Nowadays, getting a job requires at least a basic understanding of data structures and algorithms:
- Stacks, Queues, Linked Lists
- Trees, Graphs
- Sorting & Searching algorithms
Some companies even ask you to solve complex algorithmic problems that are at the level of ICPC regional contestants.
Well, that didn’t last long. The bubble burst in 2001, many companies went bankrupt, and the demand for developers plummeted.
2. The COVID-19 Boom and Bust
How about 2020? The pandemic hit the world hard. Companies shut down physical offices and moved to remote work. Demand for web developers skyrocketed.
I was able to get a job even though my portfolio application crashed at runtime—largely because an AWS t2.micro instance couldn’t properly handle Spring Boot, and my code quality was frankly poor at the time.
About two years later, in 2024, the pandemic subsided. Companies returned to offices, cut their web teams, and the job market was once again flooded with candidates.
3. The Real Culprit: Not AI, But Economics
Most people say that unemployment among web developers is caused by AI, but that’s not the case.
The Myth of AI Replacement
You may have heard of a service called Builder.ai, which claimed to build websites simply from natural-language descriptions. In reality, it was not an AI service at all, but one operated by low-wage human workers in developing countries.
If you are not in a market that pays well for your work, AI services usually cost more than human workers. Claude Code Max 20x costs $200 per month—that’s not cheap, right?
If you lurk in Reddit communities, you’ll see that programmers in developing countries cannot afford these AI services. The cost of AI is so high that it is actually cheaper to hire human workers in those regions. Therefore, the rhetoric that AI is causing web developer unemployment is not quite justified.
The Wage Compression Theory
If AI is being adopted to save money, why not just hire developers in lower-cost markets instead?
The real issue is that companies no longer want to hire entry-level web developers. Instead, they compress wages across the board:
- Team Leaders are paid at Senior-level rates.
- Seniors are paid at Mid-level rates.
- Mid-levels are paid at Junior-level rates.
With wages pushed this low, companies have little incentive to hire juniors at all, since mid-level developers are already being paid roughly the same.
4. Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
This may seem completely hopeless for juniors, but here’s the pattern: the market waxes and wanes dramatically. Each downturn brings mass layoffs, and you can’t build a stable 20+ year career on volatility alone. Anything that is hyped—web development, generative AI, and so on—is not reliable in the long term.
My recommendation is not to focus solely on web development. A CSE degree qualifies you for a vast array of fields:
- Data Science
- DevOps / Security
- Mobile & Game Development
- Embedded Systems / Robotics
- Computer Vision
I quit my job in 2023. In early 2026, I’m now applying for C++/Python Computer Vision roles—because that’s where my real passion and experience lie.
The market will boom again someday, but don’t wait for it. Find the field that doesn’t make you feel like you’re begging for scraps. You deserve better than that.
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